If you have participated in one of my presentations on Railroad History and Railroad Records, you might remember me talking about the C&NW and the Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Omaha Railway aka the Omaha. The Omaha was the employer for many of my maternal and paternal relatives, including my Grandpa Stuart. The CNWHS is a long-time group started by railroad enthusiasts and now has its own archives building. From its Facebook page “effort up till now was focused on saving things and managing their storage. The society has never really had a place to work on cataloging. Now we do have space to work, so cataloging is becoming the focus of archives as we settle in. Good estimate we have 10 million pieces of paper, give or take a million or two. Even if many are grouped together in a folder, cataloging and digitizing will probably be a non-ending task.” If you love railroads and history, you will enjoy this brief tour of the new building. I admit to almost hyperventilating. Over the years, I have received some records from volunteers at the CNWHS and now some other records are digitized on Ancestry.com. I am so excited to benefit from the cataloging efforts. To view this cool video, click on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAVNwfJScHI or on the picture below. Please consider a donation for the archives https://cnwhs.org/wp1/product/donation-archives-research/
© 2023, Paula Stuart-Warren. All rights reserved.
So great to see these efforts being made to preserve railroad history! My Dad worked for The Railway Mail Service & rode the Morning Hiawatha between St Paul & Chicago for many years! My many Irish immigrants in St. Paul worked for the Great Northern Railroad! The MN Transportation Museum is a must see for folks researching Great Northern Railroad history. It is also the HQ of the Great Northern Railroad Historical Society as far as I know. Hooray & Kudos to all of the hard-working and devoted volunteers who preserve this fascinating history! ♥️