Online Resources for Researching Bakersfield History

There are many wonderful online sources for finding information related to Bakersfield history. Below are just a few of them. If you know more, let me know.

Historic photos of Bakersfield are available here and here.

To find out when a building was built, you can do a property search on the county assessor's website:http://www.recorder.co.kern.ca.us/propertysearch/index.php Note: many of the pre-1900 buildings do not provide a year built date.

Full text of Wallace M. Morgan's History of Kern County, California with biographical sketches of the men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, 1914, is available at: http://www.archive.org/stream/historyofkerncou00morg/historyofkerncou00morg_djvu.txt

1901 Bird's-Eye-View of Bakerfield is available from the Library of Congress:

The Kern County Museum has a fairly thorough chronology of Kern County: http://wwwstatic.kern.org/gems/kcMuseum/KernCountyChronology.pdf


NewspaperArchive has Bakersfield newspapers going back to the 1880s - this is a paid subscription site but the Beale Memorial Library offers it to its in-house computer users.

California Digital Newspaper Collection doesn't have Bakersfield but it does have many, many other California newspapers that often mention Bakersfield activities.

Ancestry.com is the foremost website for searching for information on individuals in history, but other sites including FamilySearch.org and Genealogy Forum are also useful sites.

Find out if you ancestor had a dog! Index to the City of Bakersfield Dog License Books from 1898, 1900, and 1901: http://wwwstatic.kern.org/gems/kcMuseum/IndextoDogLicenseBooks.pdf