The cities we live in, the fire districts that protect us, the school districts that educate us, the health districts that heal us when we’re sick. They all have something in common: Minutes, Ordinances, and Resolutions passed by their governing bodies.

Through a grant project, our State Archives has awarded over $3.1 million to 266 local government agencies over the past 10 years to preserve these types of public records and share them with the public.

This year, the Washington State Archives staff scanned, indexed, and uploaded Minutes, Ordinances, and Resolutions from 37 different local government entities to our Digital Archives website. We added over 300,000 new pages—from as early as 1877, to as recent as 2010—to these collections. The image here shows the minutes from a Vancouver School Board meeting on May 5, 1877.

Take some time and see if your local government has records on our website, and while you’re searching, see if your name shows up in our collections. Washington State Archives has over 30 million searchable records online.

The State Archives is a division of the Office of Secretary of State.