National Archives, Pacific Region, Riverside County, CA - How to Find Microfilms in the Facility

I am beginning a new series of blogs, dealing with the microfilm holdings at the Pacific Region of the National Archives in Riverside, California, located near Perris at 23123 Cajalco Road. There are a number of microfilms (many with material that would be helpful for genealogists) housed at that location, but people are not aware of them. Here I will discuss some of them in detail, but first, let's look at how to find them.

Step One - Log onto the NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) website. The new home page looks like this:
Scroll down on the page to the bottom:



And click on "Genealogists" in the far left column. That will take you to:

From that screen, go to the lower right panel:

And click on "Online Research Tools."
That will take you to:

And you want to click on "Microfilm Catalog" (misspelling above may be fixed soon). The top of the resulting page looks like:

And you want to click on "Advanced Search" to get to:

Click on the "Viewing Location" and you get this drop-down menu:

Select the Pacific Region:

And click on "Search" at the right of the page:

The 1143 listed microfilm groups are provided with a number of ways to have them listed (by record number, record group number, or alphabetical by title). (Note: not all the microfilms available at the Pacific Region have been added to the list, so if you have any questions about a particular film, contacting the facility directly is recommended.)

Select the film you are interested in and click on it to get to this page:

On the right-hand side, is this window:
Notice that the film under consideration is at the NARA Pacific Region (Riverside):


Before running to the archives to view it, click on the "Finding Aid" - a PDF information document that explains about the film:

That will lead you to a document that explains the microfilms (note: there are 2 films for this particular selection):

The document gives a background of the organization and/or circumstances about the existence of the film(s):



And also includes the Contents of the films (note: for films listing people, the Contents will identify what people are on what film, e.g., Abel - Collins, film 1, etc.)

With this basic information, locating the films on the archives site should be fairly easy. In future weeks we will look at the specifics about some of these films.