Montana & Local History & Information


City of Billings

City of Billings Public Mapping these interactive maps include information and locations of general public information, City Hall administration, Billings public safety, Billings MET Transit and more. 


Pieces of Montana's Past

The Montana History Portal is a cooperative project among a number of our state's libraries and museums. Digital copies of historic photographs, documents and objects are made available for all to enjoy.

Digitizing Photographs

Billings Public Library has started to make digital copies of photographs in the Montana Room collection, beginning with photographs of early Billings pioneers. Take a look!


Leland Cade Book Collection

This collection has nine books covering aspects of the homesteading era in eastern Montana. Six books are centered in Golden Valley County, with many memorable stories and additional information about schools and ghost towns. Three books are business directories for Fort Benton, Culbertson, and Roundup up to the 1930’s. The author, Leland Cade, grew up on a homestead on Tuffley Bench north of Lavina in Golden Valley County.


Leland Cade Book Collection

Billings High School Yearbooks 

We now have a selection of Billings Central High Yearbooks and Billings Senior High Yearbooks available in the Montana History Portal.

Billings Gazette: Archived Newspapers

View a selection of archived Billings Gazette newspapers on two sites:

  1. The Advantage Preservation portal stores digital archives of recent editions starting with January 2013. The collection is expanded at quarterly intervals and includes an assortment of early papers from 1929 to 1970.
  2. Search the Billings Gazette’s historic newspaper pages from 1899-1909 at Chronicling America on the Library of Congress website. Chronicling America is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.

Historic Montana Newspapers from the Montana Historical Society

The full-text searchable database Montana Newspapers contains over 400,000 pages from 60+ Montana newspapers dated 1885-2015. These do not overlap with the Chronicling America website. There is a complete list of the newspapers available.

Other historic Montana newspapers are available through links from the Montana Historical Society at Digitized Montana Newspapers Online.

Chronicling America: More Historic Montana Newspapers

The Chronicling America project from the Library of Congress also features digitized historic Montana newspapers. The main Chronicling America site has historic American newspapers published between 1690-present.

Montana Newspapers in a Graphical Map Interface

This Graphic map of digitized historic Montana newspapers consolidates several sites into one clickable map for access to digitized Montana newspapers.

Settling the West

The Bureau of Land Management has the homestead records (Land Patents) and survey maps from the General Land Office - Federal land conveyance records for the Pubic Land States, including image access to more than five million Federal land title records and survey maps issued between 1788 and the present. BLM/GLO Records
This downloadable handout discusses the different kinds of land records and how to research your ancestors using them: U.S. Land Records for Genealogists

Montana Place Names

All the place names in the state, including towns now gone, are in the Montana Place Name database at Montana Place Names. Have fun searching for the town your ancestors settled in.

Billings and Yellowstone County City Directories

The early development of Billings and Yellowstone County can be traced through early city/county directories, an increasing number of which are available on our website on the City Directories page.

Mountain West Digital Public Library

You may also like to look at the Mountain West Digital Public Library. It is a central search portal for digital collections from the Mountain West region. The Montana Memory Project is one of the collections included.

Digital Public Library

To explore digital collections from institutions across America, study those at the Digital Public Library (DPL). The DPL is an open and collaborative community dedicated to digitizing content for public use.

Books and Files

The Montana Room on the second floor contains a special non-circulating collection of local interest and historical items. In addition to about 7,500 books, there are magazines with references pertaining to Montana as both state and territory, non-fiction works by Montana authors, and works about events of interest to or occurring in Montana, such as the Battle of the Little Big Horn. There is also a collection of maps, including historical maps of Billings, Yellowstone County, Montana as both a state and a territory, topographical maps of Montana, and recreational maps for Montana and Yellowstone National Park.

More about the Montana Room

Montana Room Microfilm

The microfilm collection includes:

  • All the back issues of the Billings Gazette and older Billings newspapers
  • All the minutes of the Billings City Council from the first meeting
  • Montana census info from 1880 to 1930
  • Sanborn fire insurance maps of Billings

Other Information

The Genealogy Room is located right next to the Montana Room. For more information, as well as more access to sources of local history, visit the Genealogy page.