Library Collections

In keeping with BHS’s mission to preserve and make available materials on Brooklyn’s heritage, the library’s collection focuses on the history of Brooklyn, its diverse neighborhoods, and many ethnic groups, and to a lesser extent Long Island, New York City, and its environs.  It also contains notable collections of genealogical materials—family histories, genealogies, and related resources—and nineteenth- and twentieth-century sermons, religious works, and church histories relating to Brooklyn or Long Island institutions or individuals (Henry Ward Beecher, for instance).

The collection includes over 100,000 bound volumes (including some 10,000 individual family histories and genealogies), several hundred historic Brooklyn atlases, some 2,000 maps of Brooklyn, Long Island, New York City, and outlying areas, as well as microfilm of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brooklyn City Directories, newspapers, vital records, maps and atlases, and an important microfiche collection of nineteenth-century pamphlets on slavery and abolition.  Copies of official Brooklyn block-by-block land conveyance records (dating back to the late 1600s in some cases) are also among the collections.

In addition, the library has card-file indexes of Brooklyn and Long Island subjects and names (both individual and institutional) mentioned in articles in Brooklyn and New York newspapers, and a card-file index of individuals mentioned in the Long Island Star’s obituaries, marriage, and birth announcements from 1809-1845.  Microfilms of the actual articles are available in the library’s collection.

The collection includes numerous examples of early American printing in Brooklyn by printers like Alden Spooner, Thomas Kirk, and the Rome brothers, as well as other examples of New York printing among its rare books and print special collection materials.  Highlights include early copies of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—the second edition (1856, inscribed by Whitman), third (1860), and seventh (1882)—as well as other early Brooklyn and New York imprints, histories, political works, or memoirs from the colonial or revolutionary era, with a focus on local events.  (Rare books and special collections are not open to researchers at present, in light of a major inventory and cataloging project nowin progress, which will eventually provide access to them via the library’s new online catalog.)

The library’s printed secondary resources are complemented by primary-source materials in BHS’s image and archive and manuscript collections: 60,000 graphic images and more than 2,000 linear feet of manuscripts.

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