A good deal of research can be conducted on the Oregon State Archives
website
without traveling to Salem. Resources once again fall into two categories: legal and genealogical/general.
Legal
Other resources are maintained on the
Oregon State Legislature's website. Exhibits
(e.g., written testimony) submitted to legislative committees are not available online, but
are accessible in hard copy at the Archives. Many exhibits
from 1947 to 1995 are also available on microfilm held by major law libraries such as the University of Oregon and Multnomah County.
Rules
Genealogy/General
The
Oregon Historical County Records Guide and
topical research aids
on the
Archival Records page provide inventories of records. These can be useful for finding records
at the Archives and in the counties that may include references to individual people. For example, if a researcher knows
a person died in Coos County in 1893, it may be useful to locate the probate records for that period. The step of actually looking at the records would remain.
You can look for
names of
individuals in the
Oregon Historical Records Index. This database includes over 570,000 entries from
county and state records. Despite its large size, the index represents only a fraction of the
entries from county records held by the Archives.
The Early Oregonians Search
has
information on individuals who lived in Oregon through 1860. Over 100,000 individuals are
in the database with
data from census, death, probate
and other records.