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Lexington Public Library’s Kentucky Room is an important local history and genealogy collection. The Kentucky Room is part of the Reference Department located on the third floor of the Central Library. The Kentucky Room is open whenever the Central Library is open. The reference materials in the Kentucky Room do not circulate but are available for all visitors to use in the room.
Hours and more information about LPL’s Central Library.
A photocopier is available for patrons using Kentucky Room materials. Rare and fragile items in the Kentucky Room may not be photocopied. Library patrons are responsible for observing posted copyright warnings. Current prices for photocopies are:
The collection includes materials on Kentucky history and genealogy with an emphasis on Fayette County. The Kentucky Room is an excellent place for anyone with Kentucky ancestors to begin his or her research. This webpage highlights Kentucky Room resources of interest to genealogists.
This shelf contains heavily used Kentucky genealogy books, such as Kentucky census indexes, the Kentucky Genealogical Index, Kentucky Cemetery Records, Kentucky Ancestry, and other books that contain records from several counties. This shelf is a good starting place for researchers who have not identified a specific Kentucky county location yet. More records and published histories on individual counties can be located in the main part of the Kentucky Room stack area. Search the LPL online catalog or ask staff for assistance in locating materials on a particular county.
Although Lexington Public Library does not purchase family histories, we are happy to add them to the collection as gifts. Family histories are individually cataloged and shelved in the Kentucky Room at the R929.2 call number. Search the LPL online catalog under the name of the family, for example, “Boone Family.” Visitors may also wish to consult the multi-volume set, Genealogies in the Library of Congress: A Bibliography.
The Vertical Files in the Kentucky Room were designed to preserve unique and hard-to-find information on Kentucky and Lexington, and to make that information quickly accessible to library users. The formats typically found in the files are newspaper clippings, pamphlets, brochures, programs, maps, and documents.
The files are divided into three major sections:
The Kentucky Room does not keep family files. However, an extensive collection of family files is maintained by the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort.
Kentucky Room visitors can learn about resources in other states from several excellent guides such as:
These sources assist in documenting various dates and types of available records; county formation; and libraries, organizations, and institutions in other states.
Although Kentucky is the main collection development focus, the room has a few significant resources from other states. The largest out-of-state collection is for Virginia, from which Kentucky was created and a feeder state for early migration here. The Kentucky Room has some county histories and county records from Virginia, as well as the Swem’s Virginia Historical Index, which indexes several important Virginia periodicals. Two other out-of state collections are Pennsylvania Archives and State Records of North Carolina.
Consult staff members for assistance in locating the following titles:
