The Morrison County Genealogy Society will be hosting a Family History Conference on Saturday, April 13, 2013, at the Initiative Foundation in Little Falls, MN.
Poster for MCGS Family History Conference, April 2013
For a registration brochure, click this link: http://morrisoncountyhistory.org/mcgsconfbro2013.pdf
Every newspaper produced contains invaluable historical information. Unfortunately, due to the poor quality of the paper they are printed on, newspapers are not easy to preserve in their original form. In order to save the content, historical organizations need to capture images of past newspapers. This used to occur through microfilm technology; now it occurs through digitization.
The Morrison County Historical Society has been working with the Minnesota Digital Library to digitize a large collection of bound volumes of the Pierz Journal newspaper in its collections through a project called “Save the Pierz Journals.” This digitization is imperative because the newspapers have deteriorated to the point where the public no longer has access to them and only a few were microfilmed over the years.
Because of the size of the collection, the cost to digitize half of the Pierz Journals is $30,000. To date, the Morrison County Historical Society has raised $1,325 for the project. The Morrison County Genealogy Society has promised to donate another $300 toward the project if private donors will match the amount. Contributions can be made online at the Morrison County Historical Society’s website, http://morrisoncountyhistory.org/ via the GiveMN.org button or by mailing a check to MCHS at PO Box 239, Little Falls, MN 56345, with a note in the memo line that it is a matching donation.
Thus far the Minnesota Digital Library has digitized volumes between 1909 and 1913. These newspapers can be accessed at MDL’s Minnesota Reflections website: http://reflections.mndigital.org/cdm/.
For more information, contact the Morrison County Genealogy Society at 320-632-2375 or the Morrison County Historical Society at 320-632-4007.
I’ve added a couple of preservation-related articles to the website recently. One was even added this morning after I read the Morrison County Genealogy Society’s newsletter, which contains an oral history of Vernon Radke, who grew up in the Dewey-Radke house, and an article on house history resources. That reminded me that we’ve done quite a lot of work on how to do house history because we have so many requests for this information.
The article I added this morning is called House History: Some Assembly Required, which was written as a Technical Leaflet for the American Association for State and Local History. It was published in the summer of 2009 as Tech Leaflet #247. The actual leaflet can be ordered from AASLH here (it includes photos and sidebar info), but we’ve published the body text on our website here.
The other article recently added appeared in our last newsletter. It’s called What’s Worth Saving? and discusses the difficulties involved in deciding what to preserve, whether buildings or artifacts.
Both of these articles can be found on the Preservation page of the main section of our website. (Look in the left sidebar or on the banner. Be sure to click on the word Preservation, which will take you to the Preservation page that lists a number of resources, some of which don’t appear in the drop-down menu.) The house history article also appears on the Architecture page on the history section of the website.
You’ll find other preservation-related articles on the Preservation page (yeah, that’s kind of a “duh” statement), but I’ll point out a few concerning building preservation:
The National Register of Historic Places
If you have questions about how to preserve something, let us know by calling 320-632-4007 or sending an email to contactstaff (at) morrisoncountyhistory (dot) org.
Posted in architecture, artifacts, business, charles a. weyerhaeuser memorial museum, historic preservation, history, minnesota, morrison county, morrison county historical society, preservation, website
Tagged aaslh technical leaflet, business history form, dewey radke house, house history forms, how to do house history, morrison county genealogy society, vernon radke, what to preserve, what's worth saving
