Minnesota
Minnesota
The State Archives at the Minnesota Historical Society are a large, unwieldy collection, with some terrific online resources for family history buffs, including a name search feature to die for.
Like many archive websites, it's hard to tell at a glance what resources are available online, and which ones require a visit in person. But with some digging around, it's clear that Minnesota has digitized a lot of content, both items (photos, maps, documents, etc) and database records (lookups for census, vital records, and the like).
The site index gives a good, quick overview of what's available (but again...which topics are online vs offline is impossible to tell).
A good starting point for genealogy research is the Minnesota People Find search page where, in one fell swoop, you can search birth and death records, census records, veteran's gravesites, and an assortment of other databases. This is a fantastic tool, and one that other state archives would do well to emulate. Hats off to Minnesota!
You can search the entire collection at the archives or click the button for Show only those with digital images to restrict search results to online content.
A few other gems scattered about include:
- Civil War Letters of the Christie Family
- The Minnesota Maps collection is well-hidden (try to find it in the Site Index!) but a decent resource just the same.
- The Duluth Lynchings Online Resource includes over 2,000 pages of scanned documents from this 1920 tragedy.
- 1,500 Minnesota Historical Property listings from the National Register of Historic Places
- Minnesota History Magazine archives are online, back to 1910.
- Quilts, yep, an entire collection devoted to Minnesota quilts
Don't overlook the Minnesota Historical and Cultural Grants Program, that supports historical and genealogical work.
There are also a number of other sites with an assortment of Minnesota historical digital resources.
More historical archives and research materials can be found at these excellent resources:
