New archivist at Iron Range Research Center

According to the Duluth News Tribune, the Minnesota Discover Center's Iron Range Research Center has a new archivist. Christopher Welter formerly worked "in the archives at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, where he described personal papers and business records, and assisted in making historically significant and rare collections available on the Web."

To read the article click here.

To learn more about the Iron Range Research Center click here.

The IRRC is located in Chisholm, Minnesota and is a great place for research.

Minnesota Normal Schools publications

That's Normal School as in teacher's colleges. Many such schools across the country had newsletters and that includes those in Minnesota. These provide great insight into the school, curriculum, faculty, students, alumni, and education in general. In Minnesota most of these became state universities. Some of these school publications had literary offerings, ads from local businesses, famous quotations, community information and other details. These are great research resources.

Those from two of the state normal schools have been digitized and are available online for free.

• The Mankatonian: published monthly by students at the Mankato Normal School; 1891-1913 digitized.
   
• Normalia: published by the St. Cloud Normal School; 1892 - 1904 digitized.

Both newspapers are searchable by keyword but don't neglect to do some browsing page by page to get a feel for the time period.

These are part of Minnesota Reflections which has nearly 62,000 images and documents shared by more than 120 cultural heritage organizations across the state. This site offers a variety of resources on Minnesota's history for researchers, educators, students and the public." The main page lists recent additions and upcoming digital images. The photographs on this site are phenomenal and give great insight into the state's history and include images of the schools, faculty, and students.

Be ready to spend some time on the websites browsing through the collections. I keep finding things I missed previously or maybe they were just added!

The image above is from The Mankatonian, Volume 2, Issue 2, October 1892.

And another research closure: Iron Range Research Center

Well, it has actually had a name change from that before today. But that doesn't matter when the place will now be closed to the public as of Friday, 20 November 2009 at 5:00 p.m. The name change to Minnesota Discovery Center didn't help the complex which is located in Chisholm, Minnesota.

The announcement says that it will be temporarily closed to the public. Read the announcement here. Yes, finances are the reason. The place formerly known as The Iron Range Interpretive Center, and also as Ironworld, opened in 1977. It was initially funded during the administration of then Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich. Perpich was from the Iron Range area of northeastern Minnesota. The research area opened in 1980.

The core collection concentrated on the people of the Iron Range area of Northeastern Minnesota, and on the area's iron mining and logging industries. Then it took on a wider scope with the addition of statewide censuses, soundexes, and county level naturalization records for Minnesota. The IRRC also had microfilms of federal census records and soundexes for Iowa, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The collection includes governmental records, personal papers, newspapers, church records, maps, family histories, city directories, and an interesting oral history collection. I loved the index to mining accidents and deaths.

Volunteers indexed many records such as the statewide index to district court (county level) naturalizations. The indexes were on its website. The naturalization index is also available at Ancestry.com.

I have been thinking of doing a blog post to let researchers know more about this place but I certainly didn't think it would be about sad news.