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Take time to do homework at Arizona Historical Society

Tucsonans pore over archives searching for bits of family history

Figure out a way to take time off from work and travel a bit if you're ready to research family roots in southern Arizona. In this quest for information, you are not just a few Google searches away from the answer.

The Arizona Historical Society Museum, in Tucson, is the first and best stop for information about the people responsible for founding and developing Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise Counties. The society has been largely passed over by the digital age and has seen its hours trimmed to four per day, five days a week.

Once you're in, however, the offerings seduce even those that think history is passé.

Shelves are replete with scarce books and monographs on personalities for whom many of the streets, buildings and parks in this region are named. A "clip" collection containing newspaper articles from the 1920's to the present fill dozens of binders.

Hundreds of Arizonans have contributed oral history tapes to the society. Maps show Tucson over the last four centuries, as it belonged to New Spain, Mexico and, after 1853, the United States. Photos of southern Arizona landscapes offer extraordinary glimpses of times that were unobstructed and unfettered.

The society was established in 1864 in one of the first Acts of the Territorial Legislature and is Arizona's oldest cultural organization. As the guardian of the state's historical records, it provides assistance to more than 60 smaller museums in outlying areas.

The society's Tucson museum is located at 949 E. Second St., just west of the University of Arizona. Phone is (520) 628-5774. Its research library is open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and on alternate Saturdays.

Branches of the society in other parts of Arizona include:

· Museum at Papago Park, 1300 N. College Avenue, Tempe, (480) 929-0292, open by appointment.

· The Sanguinetti House Museum and Garden, 248 S. Madison Ave., Yuma, (928) 782-1841, open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday.

· Pioneer Museum, 2340 N. Ft. Valley Road, Flagstaff, (928) 774-6272. Research material is housed at Northern Arizona University's special collections library, open 8 a.m. to 6 pm. Monday-Friday, 1-4 p.m. Sundays, (928) 523-5551.