 This is one of our frequently asked questions, so we are gonna kind of go through, we have a little slideshow for you of some of our popular resources that will go over and we'll answer questions as we go along if you, if we think it's kind of on track with what we're talking about, but we'll definitely do Q&A afterwards to hit very specific things. We have a little handout that you can take notes on of covering some of the points. It's something that we, Tim and I, actually pulled together and we also, you'll see, we have a handy website that Tim and I pulled together and the main thing about the archives for the City and County of San Francisco is and why we're going over a lot of the information that we have there is by being the archives, that means a city agency can't dump anything. They have to give it to us. So we have the majority of the resources that you'll need for building research, but we have on the back of the brochure other places to visit and, and the key things that we're going over are things that if anyone's worked with the planning department on doing something with their building, these are the, we're going over those resources too. Much of the same information, similarly formatted, is available through our website. You can go to the sfpl.org SF history location, that website, and it will bring up a list of, well, a lot of information about the History Center. One of the links is to this how to research a San Francisco building with live links there at the bottom. So anything that's online and fuller descriptions are available there. When you're doing building research, probably the best first stop is the San Francisco Planning Department's website. They are property information maps. You type in your address, it brings up the street with your building highlighted. What you'll notice is that there are several different tabs. It may be hard to read, but property zoning, preservation, projects, building permits, etc. The two tabs we find most useful are the property tab, which has the basic information that the Planning Department currently has on file for your building. And then the preservation tab, which has among other things, further down at the bottom, a list of historic surveys and whether or not your building is one of those that was surveyed. If it was, it will have information. So in 1976, the city did a survey of buildings throughout the city, not every building, but a decent number, and they will have a link through to a scan of that survey, which can be very helpful. Similarly, the Junior League did a survey, again of just structures they thought were neat, and their files of information are on deposit at the library. So if that is the case, it'll say Junior League and then Y for yes. So those are two surveys, the Junior League, the 1976 survey, but there are many other neighborhood surveys, like the North Beach survey, among others. Most of the time we have a printed copy of those surveys at the library, and sometimes you'll find a link through from this website. The next real stop, if you have not had any luck with the surveys, is to get the name and date of usually the person who had the water first turned on for your property. That ends up being, for many people, the first entry point. And the Spring Valley water tap records are at the library on microfilm, and what this will tell you is the date of connection for the water line, the name of the person for whom that was done, that can be the owner. It could also be a contractor or a builder, and it gives further along the page the very specific length in from the cross street. So on occasion there are buildings that don't have a number, maybe they didn't have a number at the time that the water was connected, and if you look at these records you can see, oh, it's on the north side of the street, 50 feet east of Buchanan, and that can give you a sense of, oh, maybe this is my property. So, and this is, you can't really see it, but this is the date of connection, the name, what they call a water number, which is probably an account number, and then the street address. Further over here, and there's another page you don't see, that's the one that's giving the north side of the street, 50 feet east of Buchanan, that sort of information. What you'll notice here also is that this number was crossed out and a new number written in, and that is often times one of the red herrings that you'll come across for some structures, is that the number here has changed from what it currently is. So that the original number was 45, but it got upgraded to, you know, 95 because a few more buildings went in. You can't actually go to the Public Utilities Commission or call them, in fact, I think we've heard of folks who have called and gotten a copy of the water applications that are on file there. So it's slightly different, but it is similar information who filled out the water application and when was that done. Okay, moving on. Block books. Property ownership. This is the stuff, the block books will show the size of a lot and who owned it at a certain point in time. So again, this is ways of amassing names to help you do some of the research on the property and then the structure. And this is the 1950 through 60 Green Street, which was originally a lot owned by Isaac Hecht, who was German, came to the city, opened a number of stores and had stores in Boston and Baltimore as well. But that's showing you who owns the property, not whether there's a building there. That's very specific information that way. And just to add a few more things about what Tim shared. So the reason that we start a lot with the water tap records and is because that's what the city considers, they use that connection to water as the built date for a building. So that's kind of where that is used a lot. We do have issues with people out in the sunset where they have wells and all that stuff, but we don't really have that over in this neighborhood. And then the few other sources that Tim showed you, which are block books, which you find who owned the property. That is, we have the information before 1914. And then if you want to find out who owned the property and transfers of ownership after 1914, you go to the assessor's recorder's office. And these are all on the back side of the little handout. So like every time we're referring to somewhere else, we got it here. We have heard that PUC, you can call them and they tell you they're really friendly and they tell you like all this information. Assessor's recorders, I think you have to go in person. Haven't heard them as, you know, even though we're all sister city agencies, haven't heard as much success stories with assessor's recorders office. Which is funny because you give them a lot of money if you own things. So I don't know. I mean, not that you don't give PUC some water money, but anyway. So we are gonna now talk about structures and buildings. So sandborn maps are these are called sandborn fire insurance maps. And what they are is sandborn fire insurance was a private company and they would go out and survey the structures to identify you know, if the building is you know, to evaluate for fire insurance and they would do it over a series of time. So even though this says we have 1886 to 1991, it's broken up into series. So it's not that they did it every year because it's a big job to go around through the city. So we have the majority, a good chunk of them are online and through a database that we pay for, so please use it. And all you have to do is get use it with your library card or you can access it from the library catalog. I should say that we do have original sandborn maps in the archives. So you're more than welcome to come use some of the print ones that we have, but these are fun to use from home. You get a map like this and then this is where there are structures. And the reason that you would use this is to see if your structure has changed over time. And so a lot of people like like there's like this little building back here as shed. So if you're arguing something with the planning department about this cottage that you have in the back, you could say, well, it's always been there since 1899. So they would agree and then you get to keep your cottage slash shed. So that's how and why it's used a lot. So it's just structures. The other fun thing would be like if you wanted to see how like different businesses have changed over time on like a commercial area or stuff like that. So anyway, I highly recommend looking at these when you get home. So and so what you would do is you would map these to do change over time on your structure. So that's why you would use sandborn maps. And then there's so many more things you can do. Okay. And I'm back in the driver's seat. One other thing that is really useful about the sandborn maps, especially looking at them over the course of time, is that if the building number has changed, it'll be captured there. So that oftentimes we have had people look something up in the water tap, thought that they, their structure was not there, moved on to looking at sandborn maps, found that in earlier sandborn maps, it had a different number and then they've kind of backtracked to the water tap, found the building. So once you've done sort of the structural stuff, sometimes one of one of the things at least that the planning department likes is to get information on, you know, did George Washington live there, sleep there, you know, all of those sorts of things, which add character and history to the structure. And so what you can do is look at journals and newspapers and other things, real estate sales, etc. and see what you can find. In this case, I actually just focused on looking at the San Francisco Chronicle for the purposes today. The Chronicle is available online again through the library's databases. For the period 1865 through 1922 as a full text searchable database. But there are several other, in addition to the Chronicle, there are other newspapers to look at. There's The Call, which is also online through the Library of Congress and the California Digital Newspaper Library. And so I, there are many other places to look along with architectural journals. And again, there are links through to online or scanned versions of all of these. Edward's Abstract is something the original Needle in a Haystack publication put out by the Recorder's Office. It details deed transfers along with building contracts, along with mortgages. The level of particular information is mind-numbing. However, if you've got some good dates, it can also be very interesting reading because along with the deed transfers, which can be helpful, you can find sort of short abstracts of building contracts. So if you're trying to figure out when did my building actually go up, who built it, was it a famous architect? This would be a useful place to go. And and the librarians at the History Center are there to help because this is not something that I would just start leafing through. Building and Engineering News, a similar sort of entry. These are fantastic and can be very useful. They include apartment buildings along with big civic structures and houses. If your building falls into the right time period, there are different journals to try for more information. Now, who lived there? Oh, still me. So one of the more amusing things to look for is who lived in my building. Not always who slept there, but that would be for the newspaper. So in this case, the city directories are also digitized. There are links through from the website and they do actually give more information than the current phone books. So I think it is worthwhile to take a look at them, particularly if you've got a name to start with, but they will often have a spouse's name in parentheses. So you can also use that if you're doing, say, genealogy as well or just interested in who all the family is. You can get that in addition. And I will turn it over to you now, Christina. Okay. It's easy to find out who owns something, but not as it's a little trickier, finding out who lived there. So my building was built in 1907, so I wanted to know who was there. So I figured out a way, if you use Ancestry, which is a database that we subscribe to that you cannot use from home, you have to use it at the library, but you can also access this if anyone's already an Ancestry user. But there's a way that you can go in and it's called California Voter Registration. So it's a database within Ancestry and there's a way that you can search this database once you're in by putting in your address. So this is how you can find out who was registered to vote there. So this is what you'll see. You'll see the name of the person and their residence and then their occupation. So that's kind of, that's how you can find out who lived there and if there was somebody famous or that type of thing. So if you all are just kind of curious, which I was for my own apartment, then this is the best way to do that. And then once you get names, then you can kind of use that in the city directories to kind of keep going, tracking them. So now we're coming to photographs, which is a whole other world. My job is actually photo curator. So I'm going to highlight some of those. We have about two million photos in the collection, 40,000 online. They're never going to be all online, okay? So just so you guys know that. So you're going to have to come visit me. I say everything you're going to see here I scanned, so you have to come visit. And we have all different formats. So we have photos. So I say two million photos, but a lot of them are actually we call it visual materials. So we have acetate negatives. We have color slides. We have prints and albums and glass plates. And so we have all different formats. So and we have on our handy dandy sfpl.orgs forward slash sf buildings. I have a whole thing about how to find photos of a building. So we tell you how to keyword search our database start there and then then there's all these different collections that you can navigate through. So, oh look, there's Tim modeling for me. So that's the photo desk and he's using. So one of the collections that you can use is the Department of Public Works albums. So DPW like to document everything that they did in regards to street repair or building structures or that type of thing. And the way you navigate it is using the little card system that came with the album. So you look up a your street because that's how they would have identified it as a project. And so you would do what Tim's doing in the photo and then you'd find it and then you write down the request and then I go pull the album for you and you get little white gloves and you look at the album. But you do see that there's homes in the background or the buildings are in the background. So that's usually, you know, people want to find a photo of their building. A lot of times when we've mentioned the planning department you know, if you want to change something like a facade or you want to go back to that original facade, you know, you have stucco now, but you want to see you think it was shingled a long time ago. Here's the proof and that's how you can do it. That's how the DPW albums can be exciting. Another source is we have some 1938 aerials. So this is these are just kind of fun to look at. But you can also use them if you want to argue about like a tree or something or if you have a driveway. I don't know. I'm just trying to randomly, I know I'm randomly picking things, but I've helped people about trees or driveways or that type of thing. So, you know, if like if you see a tree here and then your neighbor wants to cut it down, if it's in this aerial, you get to keep the tree because it's historical. So these are very important things. But there are also the other reason you would use these 1938 aerials. If you go back to the sandborn maps that we discussed, there's a huge gap. We have 1915 and then it takes a leap to 1950. So there's this gap in between and so sometimes if you're trying to figure out something about a structure, these are a good in between. Here is another thing that we have, which is the San Francisco assessor's office negative collection. So these we have about 65,000 negatives from the assessor's office and they date between it's like maybe 46, 47 to early 60s. And they're divided up two ways. One is by address and then one is by block number. And you'll get the negative and I get I give you little white gloves to wear and you look at it on the light box. Very exciting. And then and if you're all fancy with your mobile or your iPad, you'll have an app where you can photograph it and then switch it to a positive. Or you can order prints to be made or a scan. And then another collection we have is the Robert Durdin color slide collection. So these are Robert Durdin was a local San Francisco resident and he was an architectural enthusiast and he went around and surveyed properties, you know, just with his camera for about 40 years. So, but he has a big chunk are from like the 80s and 90s. For these you get no white gloves, but you get a little loop to view him and the light box. Because they're all in the little thing. Yeah, so there's those. This is the history center. So this is where you'll come visit us. We're really helpful. This is Andrea at the reference desk. So we are the archives and we are special collections and we are special. And what that means of being special is that we do have a few little rules. So we ask folks to sign in at the reference desk and you can only use pencils and you have to check your bags. But we are the quietest place in the main library, which is kind of exciting. And we're all like really enthusiastic and super knowledgeable and not quite lifers there, but I think we probably have 100 years of institutional knowledge if I did the math between all of us. And we all enjoy working, living. Living in the library. That's how many hours we're there working there. So yeah, so please visit us and do your research there. We are celebrating our 50th anniversary as well as being special collections. If your house is on a street where there are major, major changes, for example, one more. It's as quiet as green at one point. And when they built the Golden Gate Bridge, the state declared it a domain and made it into a six lane highway. So the houses were all cut, house lots were cut in half from Van S all the way to Richardson. So and as a result of that, some of the houses that were maybe behind a house had to be moved to the side of the house. And so how do you research that in terms of, and there were other gearing bouhards for example, where there were major changes. So how would you research that? Well, I would start with all of our steps that we have and then see where that leads you and then go from there. Well, and what is true is that a lot of the photographic evidence can be very helpful. I know that that is true for a lot of the, well, like the extension of Market Street, the, I mean, there are a number, just as you're saying, there are a number of significant street changes which affect where the structures are. And I can't remember what, I was helping someone with research where we were looking at the changes in the width of the sidewalks because of, you know, the street being widened and therefore the sidewalks which had been something like eight feet were then four feet or something like that. Or yeah, or that one might be like DPW because they might have that something in an annual report or I've helped somebody similar where they were researching so-and-so's house from a family house and then the city bought it and destroyed it to build a park in the 50s. So it was like actually we found more information in wreck and park minutes, you know, so sometimes that's why we have jobs. We like help you figure all that out. Like it's, and some of it is actually all online because we've digitized it, but you still like don't know always how to, who the creator is of like making those rules or decisions and all that stuff. To add on to that, what I would say is do explore the things that are available online. Try not to be too frustrated if you don't find something immediately because sometimes what you also need to do is check in with some of us at the library who've had more experience working through them. Do you ever have any sort of like meetups or workshops or anything where you bring people together? I've gone on that over a period of time because if you say it's like it's a multi hour endeavor. Do you ever have any sort of... Like everyday work? I would need incentive by the social aspect of it. Yeah. That would be kind of fun. Yeah, but now. But thank you for that idea. My second question for you is actually are you, is there any sort of preservation that's done for the materials that are on site that you, like what kind of, how do you keep the materials that they have, you know, longevity? Yeah, it depends on the yes to preservation. And that's kind of one of our reasons for some of the items that we select to digitize because they have been kind of beat up over the years. So we try to preserve them that way. So it's not just for access to make it easier, but just to kind of preserve it. And then same with the photographs. And then that's why I hand out the white gloves and everything because that helps with the, so no prints and stuff. And then we also, when I was mentioning that we're special, the other thing that we do is like we do photocopying for you. So we have a special copier and stuff like that. So we try to, you know, we have book cradles if something's falling apart. We try to provide access to everything and to make sure that you can use things. But we definitely will be kind of like not nervous Nellie's over you, but like we definitely will be like, okay, let's get you all set up. And you can, you know, you mentioned photocopying. You can bring a camera in and shoot things for free. The exception to that would be photographs and, but you can shoot those as well. And that's for nominal fee. And that's quite, quite an effective way to approach getting pictures to you. Okay. You guys are, I'm going to see you all. We're going to see you all right. Come visit. Yeah. Thank you.