Specialty books for Minnesota genealogical research

For those who are serious about researching in Minnesota, here are a few invaluable resources.

Minnesota Land Owner Maps and Directories

This annotated bibliography provides a county-by-county listing with where the particular resource can be found for each of the 87 counties within Minnesota. Included are the Map Library at the University of Minnesota and the collection at the Minnesota Historical Society, as well as those which can be found at the Library of Congress, county historical societies, and other locations. The time period covered extends from the very first such published maps in the 1860s to the 1990s.

Landowner maps can answer many questions for researchers: which Anderson family lived nearby? how was the farm divided over time (it's interesting to track the development of a particular piece of land as the area became more settled!)? where is the nearest church, school or cemetery to the place your ancestors lived? etc. Many of the atlases are available on interlibrary loan through your local public library, and some are now on-line as well.

The early county history publishers used salesmen to solicit biographical materials. For example, A.T. Andreas allowed unlimited space in his 1874 Illustrated and Historical Atlas of Minnesota for biographical information. His first round of sales put names on the maps and in the patrons' directory; salesmen returned to those customers to sell lithographs of homes, businesses and farms. Then they sold (at the sum of $.03 per word) biographies. The patrons' directory tells when the individual came to Minnesota as well as where the patron lived and the nearest post office. The biographies often give parents' names and other clues for family history. The pictures of people and places are nice, too. This atlas has been digitized and is available on Minnesota Maps Online. A full index is available from Park Genealogical Books.

Censuses:

Did you know that fur trader Faribault lived in four different counties while never moving from his first home? Minnesota started with 9 counties and now has 87 (the last was added in 1910). This means that county boundaries were in a state of flux during the period when the state censuses were taken. The Minnesota State Census Guide includes county maps and an extraction form for each of the state census years from 1865-1905. Knowing how the counties developed can lead you to possible locations for other records as well.

Biographical information:

Vol. XIV of the Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society is subtitled "Minnesota Biographies." For the people included (mostly men), this work provides a brief biographical note and an index to many of the county and local histories published before 1912 as well as references to the scrapbooks held by the society and other sources. A full-view version is now available on Google Books. You may want to download this and print out at least the list of the books that Upham used to create the volume. It's a wonderful place to start for those Minnesota ancestors.

© 2008, Park Genealogical Books, Roseville, MN

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