Did you know that HSP is one of the largest family history libraries in the nation?

Sure, we hold many national treasures, from drafts of the U.S. Constitution to the earliest surviving American photograph. But we also have excellent collections on local and regional history, and we collect genealogical materials from Pennsylvania and every other state east of the Mississippi River. The Society is also one of the nation's leading repositories of ethnic and immigrant studies materials, after our merger with the Balch Institute in 2002.

We've launched this new blog, Roots & Branches, to help highlight genealogy and family history at HSP.

We'll be writing about Society resources that may be helpful to genealogists, publicizing new items in our library, and discussing other happenings at HSP that we think will be of interest to community and family historians. We also hope to begin a conversation with you, our reader, about tackling this kind of history and how to do it better.

To begin, I thought I'd highlight some of the genealogical resources that currently exist on HSP's web site.