A Guide to Research and Writing about the History of Baltimore City
Filed under: Home Page, Research Strategies, Research and Writing
This is the official web site of the Baltimore City Archives maintained by private donations. Contributions to its support to the Friends of the Maryland State Archives are gratefully received.
VOLUNTEERS NEEDED
In order to better serve the public and bring its collections under better management control, the Baltimore City Archives is in need of people willing to volunteer to clean, shelve records, and provide reference assistance at the new facility on Mathews Street. If you would like to volunteer, please write to bcavolunteers@gmail.com providing contact information and an idea of when and how much time you might be able to volunteer.
The purpose of this site is to assist researchers in the study of Baltimore History. Its emphasis is on the public record, although reference will be made to secondary sources and private records in public and private repositories. It is a work in progress and is meant to be instructive as the time and resources of the contributors permit. The initial principal contributor and editor is Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse, Maryland State Archivist, but suggestions and contributions are welcome. The hope is to make this web site a permanent, authoritative guide to research and writing about Baltimore City with its focus on the care of, preservation of, and access to, the public record.
The Baltimore City Archives has a new home at 2615 Mathews Street, Baltimore, MD 21218. Note that the building does not currently have a sign indicating that it is the Baltimore City Archives. Instead the sign reads “Southern Steel Shelving Company.” Google Maps provides good directions. On some mapping services you may have to use 601 East 27th Street, Baltimore, MD 21211, for directions, but the entrance is around the corner on Mathews.
The duties of the City Archivist, and the management of the Baltimore City Archives, are assigned to the Maryland State Archives under a memorandum of understanding with the City in which the State Archivist is the acting City Archivist. Tony Roberts is the Records Administrator for Baltimore City. A grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission assists in placing the catalog of the collection on line with enhanced descriptions.
Access to the Archives because of staffing limitations is by appointment only. All reference requests, requests for research appointments, and all inquiries about transferring records to the Archives should be addressed by email to: ref@baltimorecityarchives.net. The phone number at the Baltimore City Archives is 410-396-3884.
If you would like to volunteer, write bcavolunteers@gmail.com, letting us know how to contact you, when you think you could work, and how much time you would be able to give us.
If you have records to transfer, or wish to visit the Archives to do research, write ref@baltimorecityarchives.net.
The records held by the Baltimore City Archives are currently being inventoried by the Maryland State Archives and volunteers on line, the descriptions of which can be accessed and searched at: http://guide.mdsa.net/. All of the information currently available on the paper guides discussed elsewhere on this site will be searchable by the fall of 2010 at: http://guide.mdsa.net/seriesSearch.cfm
Begin the introduction to the Baltimore City Archives with: A Guide to Research in the Public Records of Baltimore City and the following suggesstions:
1) The Geography of Baltimore City: Sources
The study of Baltimore City should begin with a good overview understanding of its geographic and demographic growth. The mapping of the City is discussed at length in Sherry Olson’s Baltimore, and in Edward Papenfuse and Joseph M. Coale’s Atlas of Historical Maps of Maryland.
2) The Demography of Baltimore City: Sources
Tracking the changes over time in the distribution and character of the population of Baltimore is complicated by the ever changing and ill-defined boundaries of Federal and Police census taking, and neighborhood definitions over the City’s history, but with Heritage Quest and Ancestry.com’s digitalization and indexing of the census records and the widespread availability of ward, block and street level mapping, it is possible to isolate place and people within the bounds of the city in studying change over time.
Once the researcher is familiar with the physical and general demographic changes that take place over time in Baltimore, then a thorough grounding in the general secondary literature on the history of the city is required.
3) The Historiography of Baltimore City
While research in the history of a city is shaped by the surviving sources, generally students come to study urban history with a topic in mind, often inspired by a secondary source or general research trends in the different disciplines that are drawn to urban history and planning, such as a close reading of Sue Greene’s, Fee’s et. al, and Sherry Olson’s books on Baltimore, or exposure to the Baltimore Ecosystem study.
But whatever the topic, understanding the nature and extent of the surviving public records of the city is critical to any successful research strategy, yet until recently, and for over nearly twenty years, the permanent public records of Baltimore City were permitted to lapse into a horrendous state of decay and disarray, even undoing in some measure, the initial careful work undertaken by the first two City Archivists, Richard Cox and William LeFurgy with National Historical Publications and Records grants in the 1980s.
Given the renewed interest in the current city administration to address the neglect, it would serve no purpose to criticize what was not done, but rather to provide a working guide to what has survived and how it can be accessed, adjusting the results over time to the improved storage and access that is now under way.
See: A Guide to Research in the Public Records of Baltimore City
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