The Research Center houses a wide range of resources to help you find information on your River Forest and Oak Park ancestors. Below is a partial list of our holdings of particular interest and value to family historians. Some records are incomplete or have gaps; please contact the Society if you are seeking a specific item.
Biographical Resources
Our biographical resources include thousands of names from the 1800s to the present. Records comprise obituaries, newspaper articles, letters, scrapbooks, and other personal items.
This information is found in several different record sets at the Society. See below for information on collective biographies in printed books.
Books and Printed Material
There are several overall histories of our villages, including:
- Gertrude Fox Hoagland’s Historical Survey of Oak Park, Illinois (1937)
- David Sokol’s Oak Park: Continuity and Change (2000)
- Harriet Hausman’s Reflections: A History of River Forest (1975)
- Two books by Jean Guarino: Oak Park: A Pictorial History (1988) and Yesterday: A Historical View of Oak Park, Illinois (2000)
- A book by Stan West, Peggy Tuck Sinko, Frank Lipo, and Yves Hughes Jr.: Suburban Promised Land: The Emerging Black Community in Oak Park, Illinois, 1880–1980 (2009).