Irving Archives – Irving, Dallas County, Texas

From the Irving Archives Website

The Irving Archives, established in 1981, is a part of the city’s Records Management Division within the City Secretary’s Office. The City Secretary’s Office moved the Archives to the Irving Public Library in October 1996. It is located at 801 W. Irving Blvd, Irving, Texas.

The Archives’ holdings encompass the political, municipal, and social history of the city. Collections include material relating to the history of the city, its schools, churches, clubs and businesses, as well as the history of its predecessor communities, founding families, and notable residents.

Holdings date from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and are made up of photographs, scrapbooks, paper records, newspapers and other publications, oral history tapes, videotapes, digital records, and small artifacts.

The Irving Archives’ website includes links to the Collections Guide which has additional links to the individual collections and a description of each collection. The Collection Guide is organized alphabetically by the collection’s donor. You can browse the collections by subject, and there are finding aids for the processed collections.

Online digital photography collections include:

1. Parrish Brown House Collection featuring photographs of the house built by Irving’s first mayor, Otis Brown, in 1905 and includes photos of the Brown family during Irving’s early years.
2. Charles and Catherine Schultz Collection with many images of the Rock Island Railroad survey crew, of which Irving’s co-founders were members, as they traveled through Oklahoma and Texas. The collection also includes photographs of Irving shortly after its founding in 1903.
3. Haley/Miller Family collection includes photographs of three of Irving’s earliest families: Haley, Miller, and Duckworth. The photos provide a glimpse of life in Irving during its early decades, 1910-1950s.
4. Hinton Family Collection focuses on the years from 1908 to the 1940s. Hinton’s Twin Wells Store, the Twin Wells Lumber Company and Irving school class photos from the 1930s and 1940s are the primary subjects.
5. Irving Community Lantern Slide Collection is a series of photos commissioned in 1925 by the Dallas County government. It includes photographs of Irving schools and churches in 1925 such as the Union Bower School, the Mexican School and the Negro School at Trinity Farms, the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Irving Negro Church and School.
6. Irving School Class Photos features a sampling of the class photos found in the Irving Archives collections. The online collection consists of 70 images for the years 1912-1950. People are named in many of the photos.
7. O. D. and Estelle Bates Collection features photographs of Irving Main Street businesses and early Irving residents from the earliest days to the 1930s.

Another of the Archives’ online collections of interest to genealogists are digitized obituaries originally published in Irving newspapers from 1908 to 2015.

If you research in this part of Dallas County and have not visited the Irving Archives, then spend some time browsing the Irving Archives website and then visit in person. There may be real treasures to be found.