Free Resources

Allegheny County’s Real Estate Portal is an invaluable resource for researching property data within the county. The site offers detailed information on property ownership, building specs, tax info, boundary maps and more. It is especially useful for those researching house/building histories, buying/selling a home, or searching for an address or property owner.

Users can search for property data by address or lot parcel number. In the library world, this search function is really handy when a patron forgets to write down or incorrectly identifies their municipality. Simply search the house number & street name to narrow down municipalities.

Once you find the property you are looking for, you can dive into the data. View general information about the property, including sale data, school district, assessed value from the county, lot square footage, and the deed book & page number which identifies where to locate the deed in the county registrar’s office.

Dig a little deeper when you look under the building information tab. Find what year the structure was built, approximate square footage of the living space, room counts, what type of heating & cooling the building has, etc. This is all helpful information to know, especially when buying/selling a home.

Another interesting feature of the site is that there are images of the structure available. Many images are decades old and can be used to see how homes have changed over the years.

You can also research the previous owners of a home with under the owner history tab. It often lists the current owner & the last two owners of the property. This is a great feature when researching the history of a building. Pair it with a search of the newspaper archive and you can find a treasure trove of information!

Lastly, the map feature is really helpful for when you want to look up general property lines, adjacent building information or get an idea of where county township/borough borders are. The map is interactive so you can move it around and zoom in/out to zone in on the information you need.

Happy house searching!

-Richelle, Sewickley Public Library

‘Tis the season to introduce your patrons to FindAGrave.com! (Oooh, so spooky!) It’s like the wikipedia of cemeteries, and a truly awesome resource for genealogy research! FindAGrave.com is essentially a communal catalog of grave sites from across the world – where users document the names, dates, locations, photographs, etc. of burial plots, which they upload and share.  It’s amazing how many cemeteries and burial locations have been documented by avid genealogists/researches/cemetery enthusiasts in the area – 168 in Allegheny County alone!

It’s equally surprising how many small and unmarked cemeteries are documented. I discovered this small, family burial ground in my hometown of Coraopolis, PA (in Allegheny County), which has only 6 plots.  Driving past, you’d never know it was there!

This is a great resource to share with your library patrons that are interested in genealogy!

Richelle Klug,
Sewickley Public Library