Are Your Ancestors from Minnesota?

The Minnesota Historical Society (MnHS) has some great tools for family researchers. Because both my husband and I have family from Minnesota, I have these tools bookmarked so they can always be close at hand. If truth be known, I actually have them memorized and can get there with just a few keystrokes.

The tools that I happen to use the most are the birth and death certificate index searches. The birth certificate index search is a great tool that sometimes gives difficult-to-find information just on the search results. The site explains, "This index currently covers the years 1900-1934, supplemented by about 2700 pre-1900 records."

This site contains records transcribed from county records and therefore will contain errors. But because of the search tools, it is sometimes possible to find records that have been transcribed erroneously. The search fields for the birth records include:

• Last Name (exact, starts with, ends with, or contains)
• First Name (exact, starts with, ends with, or contains)
• Mother's Maiden (exact, starts with, ends with, or contains)
• Year of Birth (pick a range anywhere from pre-1900 to 1934 or use the default of All)
• County (All or select one)

There is also a choice for "No soundex, Soundex, or Extended Soundex," The results can be displayed sorted by Last Name, First Name, Birth Date, or Birth County.

If you are like me, you picked up on the mother's maiden name field. While it doesn't have to be a search field, if the information was transcribed, the maiden names are available in the results list. This is a great way to find the maiden names of those hard-to-find women that married into the family. 

While the number of available years doesn't seem to be all that helpful, it really fills in a gap. The widely available 1900 census gives the birth month, year and birth state for each living family member born before 1900. Ancestry.com also has a Minnesota birth index the dates of the index are 1935 to 2002. So between the Minnesota Historical Society and Ancestry.com, there is a full century of births available. While not everyone has an Ancestry subscription, it is often available at local libraries.

I don't often order the actual certificate but they are available with a click of the "Add to Order" button on the results page for a fee of $9. I have used this index as a source over 400 times in my family file so it has been well used.

The other resource that I use most often at the Minnesota Historical Society website is the death certificates index search. As explained by MnHS, "This index covers death certificates from 1908 to 2001, supplemented by death cards from 1904 to 1907."

This search is very similar to the birth search with the same search fields and the same search options. Both searches also allow you to enter the birth certificate number as a search field. I would imagine might be there to allow for fast searching once you have narrowed down the results list to the ones you want to order.

What I really appreciate about the death certificate index is that there is an additional results option. You can save the results as .csv (Comma Separated Value) file. The site gives instructions for copying and pasting the text results into a text editor and saving as a .csv file. This is useful if there are a lot of results and you want to sort and search on different fields. 

I am fortunate to live less than 20 minutes away from the Minnesota Historical Society.  I don't have to order death certificates but can go to the MnHS when time permits (which unfortunately isn't very often). But to prepare for visits, I downloaded the information for certificates I want to look up and imported into Excel. I created a Word template that has all the additional fields I wanted for recording death or family information. I merged the downloaded information into the template and then add the other information available to the resulting document as opportunities arise. Other fields that I added:

• Current address of the deceased
• Death location
• Birth date and birth location
• Marital status and spouse name
• Father's name and birth location
• Mother's name and birth location
• Informant
• Cause of death
• Burial information

I have used the Minnesota Death Certificates Index as a source over 900 times and have many more to look up. There are many other family research resources available at the Minnesota Historical Society both online and at the library itself. Thanks to MnHS for making these great resources easily available!