Leo J. Ryan Federal Building (National Archives)

The Pacific Region branch of the U.S. National Archives, a major resource for genealogy and immigration research

The Leo J. Ryan Federal Building houses the National Archives and Records Administration's Pacific Region archive — one of the most important federal record holdings on the West Coast. The collection is particularly strong on Chinese immigration through Angel Island (the so-called "Ellis Island of the West"), Indigenous history, naval records, and environmental case files, and is open to the public for research.

You need to register in advance and bring identification, but there is no charge to use the reading room. Staff are unusually helpful for those new to archival research, and the holdings include some genuinely fascinating material: original ship manifests, sworn interrogation transcripts from the Angel Island immigration station, and the case files of pre-statehood Hawaiian Kingdom papers. For genealogists with West Coast ancestry, it is an essential stop.

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A story
The building was renamed in 1984 for Leo J. Ryan, the local Congressman shot dead in 1978 at the Port Kaituma airstrip in Guyana, on his way back from investigating the Peoples Temple community led by Jim Jones. His murder, followed hours later by the Jonestown mass suicide of 909 of Jones's followers, made Ryan the only sitting U.S. Congressman killed in the line of duty.