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Start your historical journey here. RELIC's email newsletter highlights upcoming free events and happenings. Genealogy and local Virginia history are our specialty as a service provided by the Prince William Public Libraries. You can always find more about us on RELIC's webpage. 

RELIC service is now available in person at Central Library, 8601 Mathis Avenue, Manassas, Virginia 20110 and by email at [email protected] and by phone at 703-792-8380. 

Hours of Operation
Wednesday: 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Closed from 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. for Cleaning.
Saturday: 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Contact-Free Curbside Pickup
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Closed Sunday
UPCOMING VIRTUAL PROGRAMS
The following virtual programs can be accessed on our website beginning on the dates shown. Previous RELIC programs can be viewed on RELIC's Programs webpage.
Doing family research is challenging for many reasons – don’t make it even harder than it needs to be getting tripped up by some common genealogical errors. This short prerecorded video covers a handful of fallacies and missteps which can lead your research astray if you don’t know how to look out for them.
OneNote is a free and easy–to–learn note–gathering and organization tool from Microsoft offering great utility for genealogists and family historians. Instructional Technology Coach Susanne Besecker breaks down the technical capabilities of this robust tool and demonstrates strategies on how to use it to organize your research and records. Registration required.
RELIC is a repository of thousands of monographs, hundreds of microfilm reels, and a wealth of other physical items – but we also have access to many specialized databases which allow us access to documents and data you might not otherwise be able to access. You might be surprised at the information we can access for you!
An unavoidable aspect of life in Northern Virginia is commuting, but 21st century drivers may be surprised to learn how much of their current commute follows routes which would have been familiar to residents two hundred years ago. In this prerecorded program, RELIC librarian Kirk Johnson will describe how the road network in the region evolved from the early colonial period to the Civil War.
RELIC INSIDER
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF CITY DIRECTORIES 
City directories can be an excellent source for family history, not only as a substitute for recent unreleased census records, but as a supplement to 19th and 20th century records.

Several websites contain many digitized directories for thousands of cities.

  • Ancestry.com (temporarily available at home from our Digital Library), primarily U.S., U.K., and Australian directories.
  • Heritage Quest Online on our Digital Library (U.S. city directories 1821-1989).
  • FamilySearch.org has U.S. and German directories. The U.S. collection appears to be less extensive than that of Ancestry.
  • The Internet Archive (archive.org) has over 3,000 city directories that are in the public domain.

These directories were a common local publication beginning in the 19th century. The publisher would send staff door-to-door once every year or two to ask for information. Local businesses found these directories very useful in their marketing campaigns.

Each directory contains a list of householders for the urban area in alphabetic order. They generally show the name of the head of household, their address, and occupation. From the 20th century, you may see the name of their spouse, whether they own or rent, and perhaps information about children (number of children, names of children over age 16). Business listings usually identify the owners. There may be a separate “yellow pages” listing businesses by sort. There are often “crisscross” indexes by street address and phone number. All of that information can be useful if you are looking for an ancestor who is missing from the census.

If you are looking for Prince William directories, you generally won’t see them in the online sites. RELIC has a comprehensive collection of Prince William city directories and telephone books which have not yet been digitized. They include directories for:

  • The Manassas area for 1960-1983
  • Quantico-Triangle-Dumfries-Woodbridge-Occoquan for 1963 – 1980
  • Prince William County for 2001, 2007 – 2020
  • Telephone directories for 1903, 1931, 1941, 1951 (Manassas), 1958 – 2009 (few gaps)

So, if you have a brick wall that involves losing an ancestor in a city, next time try finding them in the applicable city directory.
VISIT THE "TREE DOCTOR"
You can now make appointments for virtual visits with Don Wilson, "The Tree Doctor." We can set up an hour appointment to discuss and dive into your brick wall research problem through the magic of the internet. Call 703–792–8380 or email us at [email protected] to set up a time.
[email protected] or 703-792-8150
Questions and comments are always welcome.