Historical society newsletters for the win! Hennepin County, Minnesota coroner records digitized.

One of the sessions I am teaching at this June’s virtual GRIP course Beyond Digging Deeper: Sources Methods, and Practices, is “Mining the Written Words of Repositories, Societies, and their Staff.” A perfect example of this is one of the electronic newsletters I receive from the Minnesota Historical Society. Via that I learned about this digitization effort. “The digitization team often works on large projects that can span several months. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner Reports/Coroner Record Books are a collection of 48 boxes of large bound volumes of records dating from October 1906-1989. The team had previously digitized and published the first 25 volumes, spanning years 1906-1934. This month we published an additional 32 volumes, taking us up through 1958, and will continue this work until the entire collection has been digitized.” You can view the finding aid and records at https://www2.mnhs.org/library/findaids/gr02297.xml. I have not used these yet, so we are all beginning at the same point. A warning that some of this type of records can have contents that are not pleasant to read, even though they are not the actual autopsy report.