MHS Minnesota People Records Search expanded as of 25 September 2025

The Minnesota People Records Search on the Minnesota Historical Society’s website has long been home to indexes and record ordering information on a variety of subjects including births, deaths, state censuses, veterans’ burials, and Gold Star records. Now the searchable online indexes include some World War I era records of those who served. These World […]

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 […]

New Legacy Amendment Grants to History Organizations Throughout Minnesota

Historical preservation covers many angles. People, places, historical markers, and even work to apply for historical designations. The Minnesota Historical Society has announced small and large grants approved by the MNHS Executive Council in December 2023. The grants are mainly for work to be done in 2024. A selection of the grants is listed below. […]

Minnesota Historical Society website issues update

Information on the website update from the Minnesota Historical Society’s May 24 “Local History News.” The new website has some issues and hopefully this will clear those up. I’m happy to see the People Records Search and the Newspaper Hub will still be accessible during the possible month of restrictions.        

The Latest Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grants

Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Small Grant RecipientsRecipients of small grants ($10,000 and less) from the fiscal year 2023 January small grants cycle are listed in a press release from the Minnesota Historical Society. The list includes 28 grants in 16 counties. “Each project will preserve and enhance Minnesota’s cultural and historical resources. All grants […]

Kandiyohi County Minnesota township records

The October 22 edition of the Minnesota Historical Society’s Local History News carried a story about another important use of the Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grants. The Kandiyohi County Historical Society recently microfilmed township records for six of the county’s townships and the films are available the county historical society in Willmar. For more […]

Hula hoops, Barbie dolls, books, and my childhood at MHS

A current and popular exhibit at the Minnesota Historical Society is Toys of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. This brought back memories of my own childhood. Tents made out of blankets hung from the clotheslines, blow-up swimming pools, trikes, roller skates, books, Colorforms, and more. I was lucky to have my paternal grandmother, Olga Theodora […]

Great Northern and Northern Pacific railway record inventories now online

The Minnesota Historical Society just announced: “Online finding aids just launched For the first time ever, inventories of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railway companies are available online. With more than 16,000 boxes of archival records, these two collections fill more than 15% of the total space in the stacks and have been a draw […]