Help Gather in Pierce County!

The Tacoma Family History Center and our Community are working jointly with the BYU Record Linking Lab to bring often overlooked and underserved populations and their records into Family Search using crowdsourcing. This is something that can be done on computers, tablets, and phones, and will make finding records of all people who lived in Pierce County previously much easier! This ongoing project has more than 35,000 records from 1857 to 1910 and more, which are not present in Family Search. Territorial Records, Obscure cemetery records, school and voting records, biographies, and jail records.

You can help increase the coverage and quality of the Family Tree by attaching records to profiles for people.

As the Tacoma Family History Center began holding focus group meetings, they noticed that there were far fewer records available in Tacoma for people with African American ancestors. In order to help more people see their family, we have gathered data from local records into google sheets and volunteers can help add these individuals to the Family Tree. If you want to do more, you can use Family Search hints to add more information for each family and start to connect them to other families on the Family Tree.

These local records include territorial census records, birth and death records, school registrations, voter registrations, cemetery records, land records, and even early Tacoma jail records. These early records track many aspects of the lives of those new to Tacoma when the city was newly created. There are approximately 35,000 records! They paint a picture of what old Tacoma was really like.

We hope you will enjoy participating in this project You make a real difference! Click on this link to get started https://rll.byu.edu/community/wa-tacoma. Also included are directions to help you get started.

How many names can you do?