Presidential Historic Sites and Libraries

Have you uncovered a president in your family tree? Do you want to know more about a particular Commander in Chief? Don’t just settle for what you can discover online! Get out and explore the places where presidents were born, where they lived, and where their important documents are archived. Here are a few places to add to your genealogy or history travel bucket list.

For a complete list of sites, check out OurWhiteHouse.org’s Field Trip Guide: Presidential Birthplaces, Houses, and Libraries.

Historic Sites

Monticello–The Home of Thomas Jefferson
Charlottesville, Va.

Ronald Reagan Trail
Dixon, Ill.

Mount Rushmore National Memorial
Keystone, SD

Sulgrave Manor–George Washington’s Ancestral Home
South Northhamptonshire, England

Libraries

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library

Operated by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, the Lincoln research library holds nearly 1,500 manuscripts that the Great Emancipator wrote or signed, along with his family artifacts, 900 Civil War diaries and more than 5,000 newspaper titles on microfilm (many are available through interlibrary loan). It’s also home to the Lincoln Legal Papers Project, which documents cases the 16th president tried during his legal career. The Illinois State Historical Library — formerly squeezed into the capitol basement — has moved into the new Lincoln library, too. An adjoining museum and visitor center is slated for completion this spring.

William J. Clinton Presidential Center

The Clinton library is the largest facility in the National Archives and Records Adminstation’s Presidential Library system, which was formed in 1955 when Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act. Its holdings comprise 76.8million pages of paper documents, 1.85 million photos and more than 75,000 artifacts from the 42nd president’s life and political career. You can search the library’s online collection of presidential documents, as well as screen shots of Clinton’s White House Web site — way back in 1992, his was the first administration on the Internet.

Library summaries written by Diane Haddad

A version of this information appeared in the April 2005 issue of Family Tree Magazine.