Prince George’s County Genealogical Society Library
Genealogy, Family Roots, and Records Beyond the County
The Prince George’s County Genealogical Society aims to collect, preserve, and share genealogical knowledge and information with both the local community and the wider public. As part of its mission, they maintain a comprehensive genealogical research library housing manuscripts, local histories, vital records, and other materials from Prince George’s County and beyond. In recent years, the collection has grown to include materials that support research into African American families, tracing lineages that have long been challenging to document.
The Prince George’s County Genealogical Society, founded in 1969, built its collection to support researchers tracing family and community history. The library is complemented by meetings and other programs that teach the public how to use its resources to conduct their own genealogy research. The Society maintains a substantial research library of more than 5,000 volumes, including census schedules, family histories, Bible records, church registers, military records, and other vital documents.
The Society’s holdings are unique among research collections in Prince George’s County. The collection is notable for extending beyond the usual Maryland focus to include materials from the Northeastern and Southern states. It is also one of the few circulating genealogical libraries in the region, allowing members to borrow materials. As a result, it serves Maryland descendants living elsewhere and county residents researching ancestors from other states. While many of the county collections center on historic sites and spaces, as a genealogical collection, it provides the person-centered history that is otherwise missing. The collection’s full catalog is available online for researchers to search.
Although the collection is very large, it still has limits for people researching African American family history. Like many early genealogy collections, it focused mostly on documents from the 17th through 19th centuries. During this time, African American individuals and families were often excluded or only partially recorded. Enslaved people were legally treated as property, with their marriages, families, and vital events often going unrecognized or undocumented. Even free people of color were recorded unevenly, since limits on their legal rights and their ability to own property kept them out of many official records, such as deeds, tax lists, and other records used in genealogical collections. As a result, the Society’s holdings historically reflected the exclusion of communities from both records and broader society.
To fill these gaps, the library spent the last decade actively acquiring materials on enslaved and free Black populations. Such records include Freedmen’s Bureau records, free Black population registries, slave schedules, and personal narratives. Acquisition works such as Tracing Georgetown University Enslaved Persons Sold in 1838, and The Prince George’s Slave Conspiracy of 1739 demonstrate this deliberate shift toward a more inclusive and representative collection.
Overall, the Prince George’s County Genealogical Society collection is a vital resource for genealogists and historians, with its extensive geographic scope and diverse materials. It allows researchers to reconstruct family and community life across the 18th and 19th centuries. To fully represent the county’s history, continued acquisitions should be intentional, focusing on building a more diverse and inclusive collection that fills historical gaps and highlights underrepresented voices.
Images
