RLP 145: Missouri Repositories

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 145, Missouri Repositories. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional.

Nicole (44s):
Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro

Diana (46s):
Oh, hi, Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (49s):
I’m doing well. How are you? What are you working on?

Diana (52s):
I am working on my Isenhour research project. This is for the Study Group, and we are finally to the research state. You know, the first few weeks we do a lot of background information and timeline and locality research and make our plan. So this week I’ve been following my research plan and I’ve been deep into the land grants and deeds of North Carolina. And the next I’m going to start working on the land records of Missouri, where our Isenhour, our ancestor migrated to. So it’s been kind of fun getting into the records and seeing what I can discover.

Nicole (1m 28s):
So how early do you think our Isenhours came to Missouri?

Diana (1m 32s):
Well, the record that I found yesterday was a deed in North Carolina where our John D Isenhour is selling his land in 1819. And he’s not on the 1820 census of Lincoln county, North Carolina with the other Isenhours. And so I think he sold his land and came out to Cape Girardeau, Missouri in that time period, because the children who are born about 1821 and on all state that they’re born in Missouri. So I want to dig into the records of Cape Girardeau and see if I can find anything that puts in there earlier. You know, we have him on the1830 census, but that ten year period, I’d like to see if there are some actual records, the place him there.

Nicole (2m 18s):
That’s really interesting. It seems like no, he migrated right around the time of statehood for Missouri. That’s fun.

Diana (2m 26s):
I think it’s fun. And part of my research plan is to look at county histories of the area and really study the history right about the time he was coming in and see if that gives me some more clues. And I think that he came with his wife’s family. The Bailey’s because there are other Isenhours, he didn’t come with his own family. So I think maybe it came with his wife’s family. So I also want to explore that a little bit. If I can find, you know, what group he came with, they always came with people from the community that they knew sooner or later that you find connections. So I’m interested in that as well.

Nicole (3m 4s):
Yeah, do you think he married Sarah, Sally Bailey before coming to Missouri or after?

Diana (3m 10s):
Before. We’ve got a marriage record in North Carolina for them. But then I think it’s her brother’s by supposition. Moses Bailey is in several of the records, he marries, and with Isenhour children, he is the one who is performing the ceremony. So, you know, I see connections there as well.

Nicole (3m 32s):
Good job.

Diana (3m 32s):
Yeah. It’s fun. I like the stage. And then it’s always really fun to write it all up and have something tangible from all of your ideas and thoughts as you’ve been researching. Well, let’s get into our subject of the day, which is a return to Missouri. And we taught earlier about history and the geography. And today we’re going to talk about The Repositories. And again, this is sort of a review for me, sharing with all of you, as well as you, Nicole. The things that I learned from my Institute course, the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy course on Missouri that I took in January.

Diana (4m 15s):
And that was actually pretty amazing because we had gone virtual our coordinator, Pam Sarah was able to have the archivists and librarians meet with us via Zoom. And so she could not have had them come out to Salt Lake City, like it was supposed to be, but because it was on zoom, we actually could have full presentations from each of these heads of these repositories to teach us all about their collections and how to search their catalogs. So it was kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity, I feel to get that really deep dive and learn about their repositories, and of course there was so much information.

Diana (4m 60s):
There are some really amazing repositories there and they all kind of had the same sort of names. So it’s kind of confusing, but we’re going to do our best to explain and kind of separate them and give you some hints on how to search within them. One of the things I did, I started right at the beginning of the week long course, to create a Missouri locality guide. And as each of the presenters was talking about their repository or a certain record collection, I would put that in my locality guide so that I could have it organized in a way that I could use. And that has been really, really helpful. So if you are taking a course and it’s very locality specific, I would highly recommend doing a guide right along with the course.

Diana (5m 46s):
So you can organize your information.

Nicole (5m 48s):
That’s a good suggestion. It’s helpful to have some notes to help you keep everything organized and separated, especially when there’s so many repositories like are in Missouri. Right? Well, let’s talk about the first one, the main one, and this one, isn’t that hard to keep straight because its name isn’t like the others. It’s the Missouri State Archives. This one was created in 1965 by the Missouri state legislature. And it was created as the repository for state records of permanent historical value. And they have holdings going back to 1770, and they have the county and municipal records on microfilm over 65,000 reels of microfilm of government created records.

Nicole (6m 33s):
So they have a lot there until let’s talk about some of the different record collections that they have that are really useful for genealogists. They have county records. You can learn about the origins of the Missouri counties on their website. They have pages called the Missouri history and organization of counties, web pages. And this can help you learn about the boundary changes and the parent counties and all of those important things. So the county officials work with the archives and work together to microfilm and preserve the records. So they have a webpage called county records on microphone, and that has a listing by county of the microfilm rolls so that you can order copies.

Nicole (7m 14s):
And you can just see what’s there for your county, make sure that you check out the description of records series page that will really help you understand the records. It’s really helpful when you can research the source to understand what information it might hold. Sometimes I think we just jumped to searching for our name that we’re looking for, and we don’t fully understand what that record is.

Diana (7m 37s):
And I just wanted to make a comment about this description, especially if you’re just getting started in genealogy and you don’t have a lot of experience with deeds or court records, this description really helps you understand why it would be important. And what kind of things to look for in the records. I actually really liked this description, even if I’m not researching in Missouri, because it gives so many good examples of what can be found in the records. It’s just a really nice succinct list. So go to the description of record series on the, the Missouri State Archives to just get a nice little listing of what records could hold for you.

Nicole (8m 17s):
So, what kind of county records are there? Have you looked at those yet?

Diana (8m 21s):
Yeah, there are some amazing county records. So here are just some of the descriptions. They have the deeds, which I use all the time in my research. The thing that I like about this description is it talks about the different kinds of deeds. A lot of times we’ll see things like warranty, deeds, administrator deeds, quick claim, deeds, sheriff deeds, and we’ll just see the record, but we really want understand that. And so the description kind of can help explain that then there are plat books, which are great. They show the location of all the land in the county. They have marriage records, which we love. They also have military discharge records and selected service records.

Diana (9m 6s):
And we’ve talked before about making sure you check all the different jurisdictions for military records, not just the federal records like we usually do, but here we have an example on the state level of some records that could be used for military. And then on the core records, we have got the court of common pleas and Chancery court. So Missouri has some different names for courts and it explains those a bit. And then all the different records that could be in there. And here’s one that is, I just have to read this because I think it’s so interesting. The Wolf Scalp Receipts.

Diana (9m 49s):
So back in the day, they would get paid, they have bounties on the Wolf Scalps. And so there’s a set of records. You could see if your ancestor was making money by scalping the Wolf’s apparently. So that was a little bit unusual

Nicole (10m 4s):
Is that because the wolves were considered to be pesky and they wanted to get rid of them.

Diana (10m 9s):
Oh yeah. If they were going to settle, they had to get rid of those wolf packs. Apparently I’d have to do more research on that, but I am guessing that’s why. And then we’ve got tax records, which I love. Here’s an interesting one, Alms House Inmates. Oh, so many interesting records. So you’re researching Missouri need to go take a look and see what kind of records are being held here on the county level.

Nicole (10m 38s):
This descriptions page, the description of records series is just like a really long list of all different kinds of records with a succinct definition of what it is. It’s very interesting. I haven’t seen anything like that before on an archives website, but I like it.

Diana (10m 54s):
I really like it. That’s cool. Yeah. Missouri is a fun state to research and I’m glad we have some ancestors that hung out there for a little bit.

Nicole (11m 3s):
So the archives has not only these county records, which are really helpful, but they have the state government records and that’s kind of the bulk of the physical records held there at the archives. And so you can use the finding aids on the website to understand the context of these records and the scope of what they contain. They are organized by record group by the department. So you can go to the specific department that you’re looking for and see what they have.

Diana (11m 30s):
Right. And I think sometimes I think that there’s not going to be a lot for us on the state government records, but we always have to remember that our ancestors petitioned the state government a lot more than we do, because they were trying to get some relief from taxes or there was a problem with the land. And so you really never know, but you might find, plus it’s just interesting to kind of scan through and see what kind of records are out there. And it could be that you have an ancestor that worked in one of these government areas. And maybe you want to just learn more about what they did and their involvement,

Nicole (12m 6s):
A lot of people were postmasters or things like that. Especially in the early time periods,

Diana (12m 12s):
Right. We are always looking for context, for things that happened to our ancestors or things that they were involved in. And we’re always looking for the law and reasons behind things. And so these types of government collections could really help us to fill in some of the pieces of the puzzle that we just don’t understand.

Nicole (12m 33s):
Yeah. There’s a lot of different record groups here. You know, you have the office of the governor, the secretary of state administration, agriculture, conservation, economic department, education, transportation, labor, and nursing pharmacy. There’s a lot. So you never know what you might find.

Diana (12m 53s):
Yeah. And within each one you’ll have records and you’ll have descriptions of what’s found in the records, lots of research that could be done within those state government records. Yes.

Nicole (13m 5s):
It looks like they even have one about the recorder of land titles that has the original claimants from 1777 to 1851. Yeah. So we have some early records there that could have genealogical value. Absolutely. They also have vital records at the archives birth and death records were mandated in 1910, but some counties recorded these vital facts at different times. So you can look and see depending on the county, if there’s more available, they have a database called the Missouri birth and death records database pre-1910. You can search for that. And then they have the Missouri death certificates, 1910 to 1970.

Nicole (13m 46s):
And that’s another indexed collection that you can search. And it has many images available.

Diana (13m 52s):
That’s probably the collection that we are most familiar with. And I know when I’m doing a research project and I see that someone died in Missouri, I’m always so happy because those are indexed. And then you can look at the actual image and it’s great. And they do run on whatever the year scale is. So right now they’re up to 1970 and the next year you’ll get the next year. And so I know people that are equally awaiting the next year, where you get the next set of death certificates, but Missouri has done a great job in making those vital records so accessible and easy to search.

Nicole (14m 28s):
Yeah, it is really nice. I see what you’re saying that the death certificates are closed for 50 years is how you’re talking about. And then it says they are transferred to the Missouri State Archives after that.

Diana (14m 39s):
Right. And you know, if you’ve researched in other states where they’re a lot more difficult to get a hold of, you’ll really appreciate how open the state is with that.

Nicole (14m 49s):
We even have a link to Laura Ingalls Wilder, death certificate.

Diana (14m 53s):
That’s awesome. Oh, that’s so fun. It’s fun to look at and see the records of famous people. Well, let’s talk about land records because the State Archives has a database of land records from 1777, all the way up to 1969. So we talked last time about the French and Spanish eras before the United States took charge with the Louisiana purchase at that area. And so those records 1777 up to 1803 would be French and Spanish. And those land records are often written in French or Spanish. So that can be a little interesting and fun to look at.

Diana (15m 36s):
And Missouri land research is complicated because all the different government entities, you know, was the land granted by the French or Spanish or by the United States, you know, by the federal government? And so it can be a little tricky. One thing to remember that those early French and Spanish land records are listed in the original counties. So just like with any state, the original counties were really large and then they were divided up. So you’ll want to look at a map and find out the parent county figure out where the original account you would be. So you can actually find the land record that you want on the website. They have all sorts of different explanations of different kinds of land.

Diana (16m 20s):
And I like how they explain, you know, what some of these different types of patents are. There was township, school land, there was swamp land. And yeah. How would you like to have got some swamp land? So they give you some descriptions, some explanation about it. There’s the 500,000 acre grant, which was from 1843 to 1951, all sorts of interesting grants. I personally really love looking at the French and Spanish land grants. I just think that those are fascinating. So all sorts of fun things to look out in the land series, you can do a search, you can search by name, last name, first name, your year range, your county, a series.

Nicole (17m 12s):
I do notice that the swamp land included new Madrid, Scott and Cape Girardeau counties and some more, but that’s one of our, that’s our county that we’ve researched on there.

Diana (17m 25s):
Yeah. And so that maybe that’ll be part of my project researching the swamp land and what that meant. Anyway, I love this website and I think it’s just so helpful. Well, let’s also talk about census records. We use the federal censuses, but we also need to remember that we have state census records and the archives does have an entire section on Missouri census records and tax lists. So it will have a nice index list that you can, you know, you can put in your search terms, but then if you want to just know specifically what is covered, you can click on the territorial censuses and the states censuses.

Diana (18m 8s):
And then you can see specifically which counties were listed. Sometimes we get all excited because there’s a state census, but then we find out that it was only for St. Louis or St. Genevieve, but the table will help you to understand if your ancestor would actually be there. And a lot of these, you will have to contact the archives for some research assistants or go there in person when that’s possible, because a lot of them are on DVD or just available on sites. So just go explore and they have a form that you can fill out for a research request. And I know that when we were doing slick, they weren’t having people come in in person.

Diana (18m 49s):
And so they were happy to fulfill your request. My advice for these onsite or these repositories where you can’t go visit in person is just to call and ask because you never know who will be there, who can help you out.

Nicole (19m 5s):
I love when you can contact an archives and then they will send you a PDF of the record that you’re looking for. And often it’s free of charge. So nice.

Diana (19m 14s):
It is.

Nicole (19m 16s):
Well, now let’s talk about another repository. This is actually, I don’t know that I would call it like its own repository, but it’s more of a website that brings together a lot of different repositories from across the state. It’s called the Missouri Digital Heritage. It’s a collaboration between the Missouri State Archives and the Missouri State Library. And what they do is they host records from societies and libraries all over the state and they actually have a ton. They have a lot of digitized records. It’s really great. You can browse their collections by topic, by media type, by which institution is contributing in that collection.

Nicole (19m 59s):
Or you can just view them all. But they really have a lot of photographs and maps, a lot of historical and contextual information. And then they do have quite a bit of records as well. Most of the records that you would be interested in as a genealogist are contributed by the Missouri State Archives, but then there’s some coming from other smaller county, historical societies and different institutions that you may not have heard of like a special collections at a university. So it’s a really great place to go and just browse what they have and see what’s been digitized. For example, if you’re interested in learning about the settlement of Missouri, you can find manuscript, collections, records, maps, and all kinds of things together under that heading

Diana (20m 45s):
Well, I have always liked to look by topic. That’s one of my favorite ways to search a website is just to get a general view of what everything is there. And so they have a topic that is genealogy and that one has birth marriage, death, you know, your basic church, cemetery, family papers, but then they also have an area that I’m always really interested in and that’s the history. So they have pivotal events in Missouri history and then military and conflicts because we have a lot of ancestors that were there during the civil war. And that was a really interesting time in Missouri and just kind of peaking at that part, the military collection, they have photographs and then they’ve got unit histories.

Diana (21m 33s):
So I really like when I find out an ancestor has been in a certain military unit, I’ve really liked to go and learn all about that because you don’t really get that in the compiled military service record for your ancestor, right? They give you a really bare bones, but if you have that unit, you can go read some of these unit histories and discover what it would have been like for your ancestor serving in the military and they have letters and diaries. So how amazing would that be to find a diary, whether it was your ancestor or not, but someone who was serving in the same unit and you could basically follow your ancestor’s footsteps through the eyes of someone else.

Diana (22m 17s):
So sometimes we don’t know where to find that kind of stuff. And this website really brings together some of those collections.

Nicole (22m 24s):
Yeah. I’m looking at the collection called cultures and communities. And this is interesting. They have documents about Native Americans, African-Americans, different immigrant groups and neighborhoods and cultures within Missouri. And a lot of the collections are photographs. They have an African-American experience in Missouri that was created by the state historical society of Missouri. And it includes photographs and letters from servicemen during world war II. So that’s kind of a neat one. They have a lot of newspapers that are contributed by the state historical society of the Missouri as well, which we will talk about.

Diana (23m 3s):
That’s a wonderful collection. And I’m glad you mentioned the African-American collection because the photographs and some of the other information is just so riveting in that collection. So I could spend all day just browsing and looking at the different things here, but we do need to go on. So that was Missouri Digital Heritage. And then we have got another repository, which is the Missouri Historical Society. And this is the library and research center at St. Louis. So when we had our course, the different archivists would, because they knew we were all getting confused about these similar names.

Diana (23m 45s):
They would say, this is the one at St. Louis, or they would try to help us by identifying the locality of it. So this one is really old. The Missouri Historical Society was founded in 1866, and it was in Louis, in St. Louis for the purpose of saving from oblivion, the early history of the city and state. So how neat is that, that it started so early collecting materials, which makes it so valuable for us. You may be thinking, well, I don’t have any ancestors in St. Louis, but remember that this was the seat of government from the time the United States took over, you know, they appointed St. Louis to be the territorial government center.

Diana (24m 28s):
And so it really was kind of the center of all of the things that were happening. And then this society is collected things from not just St. Louis, but statewide. And they have collections that go all the way up to 1950. And then if you are researching people who lived in St. Louis past 1950, then they go well past that date. So really well worth your time to explore this website and to visit on site when you can. So they have part of the Missouri Historical Society. The part that we’re interested in is the library and research center.

Diana (25m 8s):
This documents so much of those early years were talking about Louisiana purchase timeframe and the Mississippi and Missouri valleys, the state of Missouri, the American west so much is here. You’ve got tens of thousands of books, periodicals photographs, artifacts, documents, and it’s one of the largest media collections in the Midwest. So that probably sounds a little bit overwhelming. So let’s just narrow down to really what we love is genealogists, tax lists. We love our tax lists, voter registration lists. And I like to think of those as another kind of a census alternate.

Diana (25m 49s):
And those lists may also give the court of naturalization because you have to be a citizen to vote. There were thousands of Germans and Irish that immigrated in the 1850s, and they would have to put where they were naturalized. So that could be a great place to discover some new information. Then we’ve got the colonial resources again, civil war, Dems, world war one, biography and service record questionnaires. And those are valuable because if you remember, the national archives had the destruction of a lot of those world war one service records.

Diana (26m 29s):
So this set of records was state level. Again, we talk about military on the state level and they could be a good substitute for those destroyed federal records. Every one of these online archives has kind of their page to get started on and they had the genealogy and family history web page. And then you can, again, just start exploring the different sources. You know, a lot of times I think we’re so excited to find something about our ancestor that we just immediately put in our ancestor’s name. And then we might be disappointed if something doesn’t pop up. So I would recommend that you just do a little bit more of a search about what kind of things are there, first of all, and then see what could be available for your person.

Nicole (27m 19s):
Something interesting about the Missouri Historical Society at St. Louis is that they do not participate in the Missouri Digital Heritage website. So they have their own website. That’s really good. And they have a lot of digitized records, but you have to go through their website. You won’t find them as part of the collections at the Digital Heritage website. So if you go to the Missouri Historical Society website and click on their library tab, you can find the place to go to their digitized collections and you can search. You can just type in your family member’s surname and see what you can find. I don’t remember how I originally found this, but when I was doing my eyes and our research back, you know, in my first Research Like a Pro project, and one of them turned up on this website and I found a really interesting record that he was on.

Nicole (28m 13s):
I just typed in Isenhour and up popped Deed Of Sale, signed Josiah E Isenhour, member of the firm of Horrell Gale and Company of New Orleans, agents of Champ T Stuart of Hatton, Arkansas, April 30th, 1858. And it’s a deed from the city of New Orleans. So I’m not really sure why it ended up on the Missouri Historical Society website, except for the fact that Josiah was from Cape Girardeau and he owned land there. I think he continued to own land there even when we lived in New Orleans, because his will was recorded in the Cape Girardeau county book, even though he was residing in a different state.

Diana (28m 54s):
And that’s so fun that just by typing in the name, you actually did get a record.

Nicole (28m 59s):
Yeah, I think I might’ve just been doing a Google search for Josiah E Isenhour because his name was kind of unique and I thought, oh, I wonder what else is out there? And this kind of popped up. So I just kind of got lucky, but I transcribed it. And it’s for the sale of an African-American woman a slave, and Josiah Isenhour was acting as an agent for the person selling the slave. So the research I did on the company, he worked for Horrell Gale and Company, he was a partner with them. It seems like they were merchants of sugar, cotton, and other goods common in the south. So I didn’t know that they also worked on selling slave people.

Nicole (29m 40s):
So that was kind of a surprise. She was a 24 year old woman named Louisa sold for $900. And I just wished that I had a little bit more information about her. I wonder if I could do a research project on the man who owned her and kind of understand if he was a large plantation owner, you know, kind of where she might’ve come from. So she didn’t have a last name. She was just Louisa.

Diana (30m 6s):
She could be the connecting link to a family because those sales are so important to figure out where they came from before, you know, a previous slave owner and then the next slave owner. So you should do a research project on that and see if you can trace her down a bit, try to discover a little bit more. That would be a great project,

Nicole (30m 28s):
Probably would start with who she got sold to, Champ Stuart of Powhattan Arkansas. And see if I can find him in the census records in 1860, and then maybe she took on the name of Stewart and by 1870, I wonder if I could find her. That’d be interesting.

Diana (30m 44s):
Yeah. In my African-American research, it’s usually I’m going backwards trying to find the slave owner. And so I think it would be really interesting to move forward, trying to trace and his slave person past emancipation.

Nicole (30m 58s):
Yeah. And the thing that was interesting to me that you helped me understand in this deed that I didn’t know was that she was described as being Griff’s. And I had transcribed it with a question mark, because I didn’t know what it meant, but it just said that she was a slave for life, to wit, Louisa a dark Griff’s woman aged about 24 years.

Diana (31m 19s):
Right. I had come across that in my Louisiana research before, and it was just a French or Spanish term and generally meant a child of a black and a mulatto woman, or could also have been somewhat of native American and African-American heritage. So some type of a mix in Louisiana, they had so many different terms for anyone of color. So it’s interesting to see that pop up in a deed. Well, before we leave this repository of Missouri Historical Society, I wanted to mention the archives guides that they have on there.

Diana (32m 3s):
We talk a lot about manuscript collections that are a little bit more difficult to research. And one of the services that this repository has given is a really thorough guide. So when you go to their archive guides and you click on that, you can a description and those descriptions are really helpful. A lot of times they will spell out different people that are mentioned in the manuscript, or they will tell you the timeframe or the place. So even if you have to go onsite to dig through all the papers, you want to look at these guides to see if there is something that would be a value.

Diana (32m 46s):
And so I’m just looking at one of them. That is a letter from 1911, and I just have to read this little bit it’s letter signed, Adelaide St. Louis, Missouri to Fred Adelaide, and mentions that mama and Mamie have left California and we are expecting that home at almost any time. And then it goes on and on. So they have really good details in these guides about what is held in a manuscript collection. So just because you have to go, on-site, don’t think that there’s nothing that you can do from home and looking at some of these valuable research aids.

Nicole (33m 24s):
I just can’t wait for the day when a lot more manuscript collections are digitized because they just think of all the people who are mentioned in there that researchers for those people don’t even know to look in that manuscript collection, because it’s for somebody else.

Diana (33m 36s):
Well, that’s why we do the FAN club. We record all those different people that our ancestors came in touch with. And then when in researching them, we can sometimes find their manuscript collection that mentions our ancestor. The FAN club is really how we use use manuscript collections. Unless of course, we’re so lucky that our ancestors mentioned in the title of one, right.

Nicole (34m 2s):
Or even in the finding aid. Yeah. But we have done this a little bit. I’ve done it with my research project where I was tracing our Hankurt pioneer ancestors, Sarah Jane. And I figured out which missionary baptized her and her mother in England, and then tried to track down if they had any diaries or journals from their mission, because it was quite common for those missionaries in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to keep a journal. And then families preserve that. And a lot of them are available on the church history website. So it is a really exciting experience to try to track down those FAN club members and see if your person has mentioned in their diary.

Nicole (34m 43s):
And of course we have our own ancestor who had a missionary journal and we’ve read through that and seeing all the names he mentioned. And so it just kind of gives us that understanding of the potential for those manuscript collections and those diaries and journals that are sometimes out there that we need to go search.

Diana (35m 1s):
Absolutely.

Nicole (35m 1s):
Well, let’s go to our next repository. This one is called the state historical society of Missouri, and it’s located at Columbia. And you may be thinking, we already talked about a historical society of Missouri, the Missouri Historical Society. So that’s where this gets a little confusing. The Missouri Historical Society is at St. Louis. The acronym for that is M H S and then this one is located at Columbia and the acronym is S H S M O, the state historical society of Missouri. And you can even say SHSMO if you want to.

Nicole (35m 41s):
Probably not, but it was founded in 1898 by the Missouri press association. And I think that’s interesting because they really focus on digitizing newspapers. And one of their big collections is the Missouri digital newspaper project. And they focus on collecting and preserving and publishing all kinds of materials, including photographs and diaries. Oral histories are letters and more so it’s not just newspapers. They have an American civil war collection, a map collection African-American experience in Missouri and frontier and pioneer life to name just a few. They even have a family history and genealogy collection.

Nicole (36m 21s):
That includes the typical records. You might hope to find like vital records and a funeral home and cemetery records. So like some of these other repositories, they have research guides on their website that you can explore. And it helps you understand the background of the topic. And they have links to articles in the Missouri Historical review to help you learn how to research in the online catalog, discover biographies, manuscripts, vertical files, and so forth. So if you’re researching the African-American experience in Missouri, the research guide brings together a lot of resources to help you focus in on that topic.

Nicole (37m 2s):
If you go to the section on newspapers, it tells you about 30 African-American publications held in the newspaper collection and includes a table showing the title and date of publication. So the research guides are really useful here. And I find it really interesting that there were 30 African-American publications in the newspaper collection. That’s a quite a lot.

Diana (37m 24s):
I agree. I love that collection. I just like the way that they describe it. I think it’s so helpful to see the name of the paper, where it was published at the date. You know, that’s the kind of stuff that you’re always trying to figure out, which newspaper said you’ve researched for your ancestors. There are so many newspapers out there. And so few of them, well, we’re getting more and more digitized, but not everything is digitized. And sometimes you have to go really local to find the right newspaper. So having this resource to help you figure out exactly where to look as great. Yeah. So one of the other things about the state historical society of Missouri is that they have the main branch in Columbia, but then there are also six research centers around the state for regional records.

Diana (38m 15s):
And from the main website, you can see what each one of the different research centers has and learn about it and learn what kind of collections they hold. So Cape Girardeau research center covers that whole Southeast portion of Missouri that we call the boot hill. The Columbia research center has Northeast Missouri, and this has a lot of the older collections, even if they physically would be in another part of the state, they would be held at Columbia for the older areas, including this extensive newspaper collection, which we were just talking a bit about, which starts in 1808, that is so early for newspapers.

Diana (38m 58s):
That’s exciting. Then we have on the other side of the state, the Kansas city research center for the Northwest portion of Missouri, and that’s going to hold records and information on the history of Kansas city and all of the things that were happening on the Western border. Then we have the Rola research center, which is central and Southern Missouri. And this covers the Ozark Highland and also has many older collections. There’s the St. Louis research center, which would be for St. Louis and surrounding counties. And then finally the Springfield research center, which is Southwest Missouri, and also a portion of the Ozarks. So that is where our Briscoe family would be mentioned possibly down in the Springfield research center.

Diana (39m 46s):
So, as I was looking through those, I was realizing, well, we have family in three different portions of the state. And so I’d have to really go to each one of those different research centers. We’d go to Cape Girardeau, the Rola and Springfield research centers to be able to make sure we were covering our family. So this is so interesting to know that even after everything we’ve talked about from other repositories, that then we have these specific centers that we could also look at.

Nicole (40m 14s):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s really nice, but it is sometimes confusing when there’s multiple locations and branches and you wonder, where do I go for the thing that I want,

Diana (40m 25s):
Which is why you do a locality guide. Right? And then you can figure it out. And then it’s clear to you about where you need to go.

Nicole (40m 34s):
Yes. So true. One more website we want to mention is the genealogy resources page at the Missouri Historical Society, MHS. This is the library located in St. Louis. And they have created a page just specifically for us genealogists and helping us find resources that will help us with our St Louis research, but also for broader Missouri research. And it basically is just a page of links and resources that will help you with your searches. It has kind of headers like Missouri State Archives resources, and then listing what they have, Missouri digital heritage research, and then a couple of things that they could have.

Nicole (41m 19s):
And they do focus this list on Saint Louis. But some of the items here are statewide. Like the state historical society of Missouri resources tells you about manuscript collections and the newspaper index and the photo. And then it tells you also about the St Louis county library resources, which we haven’t talked about yet today. So it gives you some more ideas and things you can do there, as well as the St. Louis Genealogical Society, which has other resources. There’s a lot of public libraries and other universities that have records. So this page really brings together a lot of information. And like Diana mentioned earlier, St. Louis was the head of government and the territorial time period.

Nicole (42m 1s):
So you might find records for your earliest Missourians in these collections that are kind of focused on St. Louis,

Diana (42m 10s):
Right? I love it when a webpage brings together a lot of different resources. And so this one really is a good place to start, especially if you do have ancestors in the St Louis area would be great to start with that and then move to some of the other repositories. So I hope that you’re really excited to go explore some of the different repositories in Missouri and in the show notes, we’ll link to the blog posts that I wrote about research in Missouri, The Repositories, where I do spell out all these different libraries and archives that we’ve talked about with links to those, because it is competing in even having taken classes and looked at each of the websites and talked about them.

Diana (42m 53s):
I still get them confused. I think the only way to really get them straight is just to go there in person. You know, that’s when we, we really can connect the name to a place by visiting in person, but until then we do our best to figure out the different repositories and what they hold and do our research.

Nicole (43m 12s):
All right. Well, thanks for putting together that fun blogpost and outline for this episode. And I hope everyone who has Missouri research ahead of them found something useful.

Diana (43m 22s):
All right, bye bye everyone. Bye.

Nicole (43m 25s):
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