Research Center

If you are researching a home or property in the historic district in Port Townsend, you can use Washington DAHP’s WISAARD portal, which holds information about historic properties throughout the state.

The Washington Information System for Architectural and Archaeological Records Data (WISAARD) is an award-winning online GIS map tool for locating designated historical sites which are listed on the state and national register. Information includes images of the property, a short summary description about the significance of each resource, and a link to the nomination and/or inventory form.

If the place you're researching has been surveyed by a previous researcher or preservationist (such as a home in the historic district), you’ll find the notes through the WISAARD portal. Check out our short video on how to use this tool.

You can also search our online collection. We have tagged the photographs and records with street names where possible. We recommend searching by street name rather than a specific address because if an adjacent house or area has a photo, it may have images of your house in the periphery or background!

General search terms (i.e., aerial, uptown, downtown, waterfront) or searching by town are also a great place to start. Due to resource constraints, we are not able to digitize all JCHS records and collections, but we have tried to prioritize photographs and visual research materials.

Some historic parcel maps are available online, but none from our collection have been digitized yet. You may, however, have some luck on the Washington Secretary of State Archives. These are also your best resource for the territorial census and information related to our region before and after it officially became a state (1889). It also has several maps and other records you may find helpful in your research.

The Library of Congress (LOC) is another helpful online resource. The LOC has digitized Sanborn Insurance maps from the turn of the 19th/20th century, which are very helpful in understanding the use of different buildings and what they were made from. You can learn more about Sanborn Insurance maps and access the Sanborn maps for Port Townsend on the LOC website.

This list from Home Advisor outlines several resources you might review when researching your property, like census records, family records, maps, and so much more. We recommend looking at these resources as part of your research.

We have many resources about local properties available at our Research Center, including parcel maps, newspapers, and many early documents related to property transfer in Jefferson County.

One excellent place to start is with our vertical files, which are collections of copied information about a property. If a researcher has used our collection to look more closely at a property in the past, it probably has a vertical file!

Another major resource at our Research Center are old tax accessor books. We have the oldest ones for the county, but more modern accessor rolls are likely housed with the Washington Secretary of State. The older books in our collection can be very challenging to reference due to their size and the limited amount of information in each book. If all other avenues fail, you may set up a research appointment to look at these ledgers. They are very large and heavy, so we ask that you set up an appointment in advance to make sure we have staff present who can physically lift them.

If our center is closed, you can send an email with the specific address to research@jchsmuseum.com and our research staff will let you know if we have something on file. We are currently not able to perform in-depth research, but we can respond to a few requests each week. It may take a while for us to provide a response and we appreciate your patience while we work to get to your request!