Early School Attendance Records of Sonoma County, California

School attendance records (registers) have been preserved in a number of different ways in Sonoma County. The genealogical value of these records is similar, in many ways, to the value of tax records. They place a child in a certain school at a certain date. 

Volume I, consists of data collected by a member of the Sonoma County Genealogical Society who went from school to school seeking specific information including 1) name of student, 2) school attended, 3) date of first record, 4) date of last record, and 5) age and grade of student on entry and/or exit. This volume contains school attendance records beginning in 1858 and generally ranging to the 1920s, listing over 12,000 students. A list of schools is included in this study, and a list of those not included can be found at the History and Genealogy Library. An extra bonus is that in some, but not in all cases, birth dates, information on transfer to or from another location, the names and addresses of parents when available, and notes about irregular or intermittent attendance are included.

Volume II consists of a set of selected school attendance record pages which were duplicated from school registers. This volume contains over 12,000 listings of pupils in 19 schools and ranges in date from 1874 to 1932. In addition to records of attendance, many of these registers also contained pages of general information. These pages of general information are where the names and addresses of parents, and birth dates of the children, were often, but not always, found. These records do not lend themselves to determining the date of first entry or last record for a given student at a particular school as was the case in Volume I. However, in most cases, they do provide the general time period, names and addresses (or general area) of parents in a given school district, and often, birth dates of children.

Copies of the original registers are located in the History and Genealogy Library, Santa Rosa, California, and in the Sonoma County archives.

Early School Attendance Records of Sonoma County, volumes I and II are available for research at the Sonoma County History and Genealogy Library (the Annex) and the Healdsburg branch (see the SCL Search Page).

Both of the volumes are available for purchase at Heritage Books:

Early School Attendance Records of Sonoma County, California, Beginning 1858

Early School Attendance Records of Sonoma County, Calif.: Volume II, 1874-1932