Privacy
Last updated .
National Historical Register has no accounts, no sign-up and no contact forms. It does not ask for your name or email and does not sell data. Below is everything that is collected when you use it, and why.
Analytics (Google Analytics 4)
We use Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages and tools are useful. It records the pages you view, the site that referred you, your browser and device type and an approximate location derived by Google from your IP address (Google Analytics 4 does not store the IP address itself). We also record three of our own events, none of which contains personal data:
address_lookup: that the address lookup was used, how many listings it found and whether the point is inside a historic district. The address itself is never sent to Google Analytics; we also strip it from the page address we report.map_load: that an interactive map was opened.nomination_open: that a nomination document link was followed, with the property's National Register reference number.
Visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland: analytics and advertising storage are switched off by default, so no analytics or advertising cookies are set. Google may still receive cookieless signals (for example, that a page was viewed) that it uses for aggregate modelling. Elsewhere, Google Analytics sets first-party cookies to tell new visits from returning ones.
Advertising (Google AdSense)
Pages other than the tools load Google's AdSense script so the site can show ads in future. Where ads are shown, Google and its partners may use cookies to serve and measure them, and outside the regions listed above may personalise them. In the EEA, UK and Switzerland, advertising storage and personalisation are off by default. See how Google uses information from sites that use its services.
The address lookup
When you search an address, the text goes to our own server, which asks OpenStreetMap's public Nominatim service for its coordinates (Nominatim sees our server, not you) and then searches the National Register data near that point. To avoid asking Nominatim twice for the same address, our server keeps the normalised address text with its coordinates in a cache. That cache holds no IP address, cookie or other identifier, so it cannot tell who searched. "Use my location" sends your device's coordinates to our server for that one search; they are not stored.
Server logs
Like almost every web server, ours keeps standard access logs (IP address, time, requested address, browser string) for security and troubleshooting. They are not shared and not used for profiling.
Maps, photos and fonts
Map tiles, photographs and all scripts other than Google's are served from this site's own server. When you open an interactive map, its label fonts and icons are loaded from Protomaps' public asset host (protomaps.github.io), which sees your IP address like any web server. Links to the National Archives, Wikipedia, Wikidata and other sites take you to those sites, which have their own policies.
Your choices
- Block or delete cookies in your browser; the whole site works without them.
- Install Google's Analytics opt-out browser add-on.
- Content blockers that block Google Analytics or AdSense do not break any feature of this site.
Regions where storage is denied by default: AT, BE, BG, HR, CY, CZ, DK, EE, FI, FR, DE, GR, HU, IE, IT, LV, LT, LU, MT, NL, PL, PT, RO, SK, SI, ES, SE, IS, LI, NO, GB, CH.