KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A brand-new online collection called KC-1940 was launched by the Kansas City Public Library. It brings together images of neighborhood homes, businesses, banks, schools, parks, shops, and buildings from the 1940 Jackson County tax assessment. The website hosts more than 50,000 images organized in 4,284 folders, each representing a city block. KC-1940 will help the public more easily locate specific photographs. The physical collection was first acquired by the library in 2011. With grant support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Missouri State Library, staff worked to digitize each block folder that contained small black and white photographs. Missouri news: Headlines from St. Louis, Jefferson City and across the Show-Me State Since 2012, the collection has been accessible online through Missouri Digital Heritage. In recent years, the Library has offered a series of popular House History Boot Camp events to help patrons access the collection and learn the history of their homes. "The tax assessment came out of the corrupt Tom Pendergast political machine, the end of the Pendergast era, where there needed to be a kind of honest accounting of property tax values,” Jeremy Drouin, the special collections manager, said. “But it’s a snapshot of 1940 Kansas City and how the neighborhoods were mapped out.” Many photographs do not list an address—very few addresses were connected with the individual properties in the original collection material. If you know the address of a specific property that appears in a folder, you can submit the address on the website.