I love genealogy, so it’s no big surprise that one of the first projects I crossed off the list in our new Northfield History Collaborative grant was uploading Bridgewater Township’s birth and death records.

There are two books to see: Book L covers 1871 to 1899, and Book M covers 1899 to 1907. Both books are fully transcribed, meaning they are searchable, and you can copy and paste the typed text. The books were always available to the public on request from Bridgewater Township (and more recently the Rice County Historical Society), but now you can view (and search!) them from anywhere on the planet whenever you like.

These particular books are of note for genealogists and local historians because they are the two earliest books of vital records kept by that jurisdiction (to my knowledge). At this time, a birth or a death probably wasn’t registered at the county or state level – the township may have been the only place to record it, if it was reported to any jurisdiction at all.

Things that I noticed:

• Ages: When I think of pioneer women, I tend to think of them getting married around 17, and then popping out babies ’til they’re 30 or 35 — which these records often do reflect. But there are also cases of women having babies – sometimes first babies – in their late 30s and into their 40s.
• Infant mortality: So many of the deaths listed here are children, and I’d say most are under 1 year old. Very sad to read through.
• Causes of death: Of the adults, a significant number of the deaths are due to tuberculosis (called consumption then), especially early on. Diptheria makes a regular appearance, and you’ll also see typhoid, meningitis, and a couple cases of cholera. “Old age” is listed as cause of death in people from their early seventies into the nineties. And then there are a few things that make me scratch my head: Congestion of brain, lung fever, brain fever, throat disease. On the whole, people seemed to me to die significantly younger than they do now, and of things that aren’t fatal now.
• Immigrants: The early records show that a lot of the settlers in their childbearing years were from Canada. This surprised me at first. But, when you think about it, some of the Dundas-area milling folks, like the Archibalds, came from Canada — and the original “Dundas” is in Ontario, too. There were plenty of German immigrants in the records. I didn’t see as many Norwegian or Swedish immigrants listed as I expected, but I wonder if they simply weren’t as faithful about reporting births and deaths to the township.

A few tips for researchers:

• The first part of the book is births; the second part (but more than halfway in) is deaths.
• A complete birth or death entry occurs first on a left-hand page, then continues onto the next right-hand page. You’ll find the combined transcriptions for the spread attached to both the left- and right-hand pages.
• Births and deaths are not listed in the order they occurred. All of the births or deaths for a particular year are listed together (with one or two exceptions), but they appear to be listed by either the date the event was reported or the date that the recorder had time to record it!
• In many cases, the name for a child is not listed for a birth. Try looking for a parent’s name.
• Keep in mind that parents sometimes reused a name if a baby died.
• In the case of twins: the two babies’ births are not always listed in order! Also, the fact that two babies are twins might not be noted. Or, in one case, only one line occurs in the book to report a set of twins, rather than two separate entries.

Again, I’d like to commend Bridgewater Township for taking an active and proactive role in preserving the life of their records. Read more about their other six books in the Northfield History Collaborative here.

On a related note, the History Collaborative will also be adding some early birth and death records from the city of Northfield sometime between now and June 2014. Stay tuned!

I won’t re-tell the whole story because you can already get it at the Faribault Daily News and KYMN Radio.

But here it is in brief: The newest member of the Northfield History Collaborative is Bridgewater Township, an area of Rice County that’s immediately west of Northfield and Dundas. The township has begun its online collection with a bang: six record books spanning 1858 to 1889, fully transcribed, totaling nearly 900 pages.

The six books are:

• Bridgewater Township Town Record, 1858-1863, and Chattel Mortgage Book No. 1, 1860-1864
• Bridgewater Township Town Record, 1863-1867, and Chattel Mortgage Book No. 2, 1868-1882
• Bridgewater Township Town Meetings, April 2, 1867 to March 5, 1889
• Bridgewater Township Road Book, 1858-1871
• Bridgewater Township Road Accounts, 1871-1878
• Bridgewater Township Road Book, 1870-1877

Bridgewater Township has been pro-active about preserving its oldest records. The books now reside at the Rice County Historical Society, where they will be secure, centrally located, and in a stable climate. Thousands of pages were scanned — this makes the content easier to access, and means fewer times the originals need to be handled.

The big story here is how a group of volunteers helped out. The volunteers, mainly members of the Rice County Genealogical Society, have spent years carefully typing up each page of the first six books, then double-checking their work. The result is the collection posted above, full-text searchable.

Take some time to browse through this project and appreciate the hard work of these volunteers.

Stay tuned later this fall for birth and death records from Bridgewater Township from the 1870s to 1910s.

Now online at the Northfield History Collaborative: Minutes from one of Northfield’s earliest organizations, the Lyceum Society.

To be exact, these are typewritten transcriptions of the original minutes, done decades ago by an unknown person. We hope to someday have scans of the originals to share, as well! Those reside at the Rice County Historical Society.

“Believing in the utility of societies for intellectual improvements — We, citizens of Northfield, agree to unite ourselves into an association for the purpose of establishing a Reading Room — Circulating Library, and Debating Society,” a group declared in their 1856 constitution. (That document and bylaws precede the meeting minutes.) The minutes here span to December 7, 1863. Enjoy!

In the coming week, Northfielders will remember longtime Northfield News writer and editor Maggie Lee, who died Monday, July 8, at 92. She was also a founder of the Northfield Historical Society. Today the Collaborative celebrates her life with these photographs and programs.

On a personal note, I worked with Maggie for several years. Some of the things I will remember her for:

• Even when she was in her late 80s, Maggie came in to the the newspaper office on Saturdays;
• She loved Northfield history;
• The purple and the cats, of course — she even kept pictures of her cats in her purse! I seem to remember her once telling me she didn’t necessarily start wearing purple all of the time because she loved it, but someone complimented her once on a purple outfit, and eventually she wore the color so often that people expected it. Later when I asked her about that story, though, she couldn’t remember it;
• She stopped every day to pet the cat at the pet store;
• She was allergic to lots of things. I remember her saying that she couldn’t be nursed as a baby and they had to use some cutting-edge substitutes for that time.
• She was born in the Northfield Hospital when it was at Eighth and Water streets. Her telling me that was the first time I learned there was a hospital at that location;
• Maggie had lots of snacks — in her desk drawer, or in a little baggie when she was paging through the bound newspapers;
• She liked root beer floats at the Cocoa Bean;
• The one day she didn’t wear her wig to work;
• She got around! A street view of Google Maps pictured her crossing the street at Union and Fourth in 2007.
• But she always sat in the same place at church.

Items in the Northfield History Collaborative are viewed online through a generous partnership with Carleton College. The college uses a common content management system called ContentDM to organize these materials.

Over the past week, Carleton completed its upgrade to a newer version of ContentDM. In addition to a new look, improvements include a wider image-viewing window and social media components — users can now tag items, rate items, leave comments, and share items via 300+ social media programs.

Pop on over to see the new system! Learn more about how to use ContentDM here.

Please note that objects in the Northfield History Collaborative may be unavailable June 25-27 as Carleton College upgrades to a newer version of ContentDM. Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to sharing the viewer improvements with you.

You want to take care of your organization’s materials and preserve them for future generations. But what do you save? What do you throw? And how do you store the things you keep? How do you best use the time you have for preservation? And why is it important?

The Northfield History Collaborative will host a free workshop focused on the care and handling of books, papers, and printed photographs in a business or organizational setting on May 3. The event, for partner organizations and potential partners, will be held from 8:30 a.m. to noon in the Larson Room 236 (formerly the library) at the Carleton College Weitz Center for Creativity, 320 3^rd St E.

Check-in for the workshop begins at 8:30 a.m., with the program to commence at 9 a.m.  Topics to be covered include preservation basics, how to decide what to keep, options for heavily-used materials, where to get supplies, and the do’s and don’ts of handling and storage. Presenters will include professionals from the Northfield and Rice County historical societies and from St. Olaf and Carleton colleges.

The 30 spaces for the workshop will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. Contact Collaborative Project Coordinator Ariel Butler at butler@northfieldhistory.org or call the Northfield Historical Society at 645-9268 to register.

The free workshop is funded by a Legacy Grant through the Minnesota Historical Society to the Collaborative. The Northfield History Collaborative is a partnership of 12 groups in town who work together to digitize materials that tell Northfield’s diverse history. Check out more than 5,000 objects at www.northfieldhistorycollaborative.org.

New photographs and documents in the Northfield History Collaborative collection help tell the early story of the Northfield Hospital.

Scans of the first minutes book of the Northfield Hospital Association tell the story from its beginning. The first page describes how, in 1910, the local International Order of Odd Fellows Home had decided to no longer operate the hospital on its grounds. They offered to rent the facility to a hospital board for $60/month.

The private Northfield Hospital Association operated from the Odd Fellows Home for just a few months before they decided to relocate. On Sept. 17, 1910, the board took the following action:

“It was decided after considerable discussion to refuse to accept the lease offered by the board of directors of the I.O.O.F. Hospital. After due consideration the secretary was instructed to buy the [S. D.?] Schilling house Cor. 8th Street and east Water street for the sum of $4500.00 to be used for hospital purposes.”

A photograph of the rear of that house is among the 20 added this winter. The house still stands today.

Among the other new photographs is one of three young women who were injured during the Defeat of Jesse James Days in the 1960s. Writing on the back of the photograph indicates they were from a drum and bugle corps in St. Paul and were riding on the side of a fire truck when it tipped over while taking a sharp curve.

On the lighter side, there are a few images of the Northfield Hospital nursery in the 1950s-1970s, including their isolette equipment and a baby being weighed inside an isolette. (If the nurse has fully let go of the infant — which it’s not clear she has — it appears the infant weighed either one or 11 pounds!)

About a quarter of the Northfield Arts Guild theater programs that ever existed are now available online.

The Arts Guild has a dream of making all of its programs available online and searchable in an Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com)-type format. This addition of 97 programs brings them a significant part of the way toward that goal.

Through the ContentDM interface that the Collaborative uses (through a generous partnership with Carleton College), these programs are full-text searchable already (or will be very soon — transcriptions for the handwritten programs will be available in the coming weeks). Want to know how many of these productions the legendary Myrna Johnson was involved with? A search shows that it’s at least 70 of the 97.

Maybe you’re going to put on a production of “Amahl and the Night Visitors” and you want to look into how the Arts Guild did it previously. You’ll find programs from four past performances.

Take a look around. You’ll find that friends, neighbors, or family members have been involved with the Arts Guild in ways you never suspected, or maybe you’ll look back on some fond memories.

I’m particularly excited about these latest additions to the Collaborative from St. John’s Lutheran Church of Northfield. Church records give us clues to our ancestors’ everyday lives that sometimes other documents can’t. We get an idea what was important to them and who some of the people they really knew were. Just now, St. John’s is the Collaborative’s only church partner, but as we grow, we hope to change that and make accessible many more of these types of things.

New to this collection are 74 photographs and scans of the church’s earliest record book.

The photographs are a selection from hundreds in the church archives. These include mainly images of their first and second buildings, along with some photographs of pastors, staff, and congregants.

One that makes my jaw drop: The only known image of the interior of St. Johannes Lutheran Church, their first building at the corner of Washington and Fourth streets.

Other photographs include one of four early pastors, a portrait of the 1945 children’s choir, a portrait of European refugees (or “displaced persons”) brought to Northfield by the church in the 1950s, and an image of the congregation and the St. Olaf College Band outside the St. Johannes building. Of personal interest to me is a pink house that stood near the church; it was moved in the late 1980s to make way for a building expansion, and I remember watching the house go down the street!

Perhaps the more significant addition for researchers are the scans of the church’s earliest record book, covering the years 1867 to 1880. This book was microfilmed in the past, but the original is delicate and has been locked away. Scans available online keep the original safe but also make it available around the world 24/7 — and even better, it’s searchable.

Don’t be intimidated that the book is in Norwegian. The vast majority of it is names, and the formatting of the pages makes the meaning of the Norwegian words pretty obvious.

Sections of the book include a membership list, baptisms, confirmations, marriages, funerals, and communions. Of particular local interest is the list of funerals, including an entry for one “Nicolaus Gustavson,” a bystander killed in the raid on the First National Bank.

Tell us what interests you! What types of materials from St. John’s Lutheran Church would you like to see in the Collaborative? What other local churches would you like to see materials from? Leave comments here or contact me at butler (at) northfieldhistory.org.