Biographies & People

Access to Ancestry.com is available from within the Library. Contains billions of names from census records, passenger immigration lists, vital records (birth/marriage/death), war and muster lists, court/land records, images, indexes, narratives and much more. Please consider using Heritage Quest, opens a new window, as an alternative to Ancestry Library, for those who wish to do genealogical research from home.

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Outstanding research support with nearly a million biographical entries spanning history and geography. A curriculum-aligned resource with media-rich content updated daily.

Contextual information on a wide array of subjects.  Topical content includes articles, primary sources, images, relevant web links, and more.

Offers cross-curricular content aligned to Common Core State Standards and provides stellar support for papers, projects, and presentations.  

Created specifically for middle school students, this resource combines reference content, videos, newspapers, magazines, primary sources, and more. Categories cover a range of the most-studied topics including cultures, government, people, U.S. and world history, and literature.

An integrated research experience that brings together multiple literary databases to search literary criticism plus primary sources, literary and cultural analysis, and information on influential literary figures from all eras and genres.  Microsoft and Google classroom integration.  (Formerly named "Literary Sources")

Access to scanned images of the U.S. census records, Periodical Source Index (PERSI), Freedman’s Bank Records, the U.S. Serial Set, Revolutionary War records and more!

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Full-text articles, literary criticism, reviews, biographical information, and thousands of full-text poems and short stories published in contemporary journals and magazines.

Search by name or keyword to find references to articles, book chapters, and other resources containing information on the people and events that have shaped our local history. All sources referenced in the index are available in the Northwest Room at Main Branch.

Authoritative, curriculum-oriented information for assignments and projects on earth science and life science, to space, technology, mathematics and science history.

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An index of obituaries published in the Tacoma News Tribune / Morning News Tribune. (Microfilm of the original obituaries available at the downtown Main Library.) Complete coverage from 1980 to the present, partial coverage pre-1980..

The Thomas Schofield Handforth Collection comprises the art output of Thomas S. Handforth and related items in the collections of the Tacoma Public Library. The Tacoma Public Library received the Handforth collection in a number of increments from the Handforth family and a number of his friends and associates along with a small collection from Caroline Schneider of Seattle in 1982.

A complete overview of U.S. history covering the most-studied events, issues and current information combining documents from primary sources, periodicals and reference materials.

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