FY2007 Annual Report
Records Services: FY07 Annual Report
The Records Services Division of the Office of the Secretary of State is comprised of three units, the Missouri State Archives, the Local Records Preservation Program, and State Records Management. The three units work together to preserve public records of all types, including documents, books, maps, photographs, films, audio recordings, and moving pictures.
Each unit offers specific services. The Missouri State Archives houses and provides access to permanent Missouri state government records. The Local Records Preservation Program assists counties, cities and other local government entities with the management and preservation of their records. The State Records Management Program assists state agencies with organizing and managing their records.
Missouri State Archives
The Missouri State Archives is the official repository for permanent state records of enduring historical value. Most of the records in the State Archives come to it through the Local Records Preservation Program and the State Records Management Program, both of which appear below. The State Archives' mission is to foster an appreciation of Missouri history and illuminate contemporary public issues by preserving the state's permanent records and making them available to its citizens and their government.
Holdings and Research
The State Archives' vast collections and holdings, dating from 1770, allow professional historians and other researchers to uncover information that brings family histories to life and enlightens citizens to our collective past. The State Archives is Missouri's largest repository for historical documents. Its holdings include:
- more than 338 million pages of records of permanent value
- almost 500,000 photographs (negatives, prints and slides)
- nearly 199,000 reels of microfilm and 270,000 microfiche
- more than 9,000 maps
- tens of thousands of state publications
- a variety of audiovisual materials (audiotapes, CDs, moving pictures, videos, etc.)
The State Archives preserves records that document Missouri's history from the era of French and Spanish colonial rule to the present day. Among the holdings of the State Archives, researchers will find documentation of every aspect of life in Missouri.
Researchers and Genealogists in the reading room
Records housed in the State Archives support the full range of research interests – from schoolchildren's studies to family history to academic research. They support research in topics and themes as diverse as: the part western Missouri towns played in westward expansion; St. Louis' role in the international fur trade; slavery; the Civil War; western outlaws; military records of Missourians from the War of 1812 to the start of World War II; European immigration; and Missouri politics.
Among the larger records series at the State Archives are governors’ papers, general assembly records, Missouri Supreme Court case files, records and publications from state agencies and departments, and millions of microfilmed county and municipal records.
Many researchers continue to use traditional means to access the Archives. They visit in person, raise questions via telephone, and place requests via mail. In FY07, the Archives filled 19,605 research requests in the Alex M. Petrovic Reading Room, answered 9,170 phone requests, responded to 6,521 e-mail requests, and fulfilled 12,219 research requests via postal mail.
The vast majority of researchers, however, have turned to the Internet as their preferred research medium. In FY07, the Archives received more than 30 million web searches, an increase from previous years.
Exhibits
Loading traveling exhibits for shipment
The State Archives’ exhibits use documents, photographs, and artifacts to allow patrons to experience Missouri's rich history. Archives’ exhibits, both physical and virtual, are designed to encourage visitors to seek new perspectives and gain an understanding of Missouri's journey from the past to the present.
Between July 2006 and June 2007, more than 50,000 Missourians had the opportunity to view four Missouri State Archives exhibits at fifteen different venues across the state.
This exhibit first opened at the State Archives in April 2004 and continued its three-year tour of the state by traveling to six venues in FY07. This exhibit proved very popular with school groups during its stay at the Powers Museum in Carthage from March through May 2007. In an effort to better prepare classes for visits to the exhibit, Michele Hansford, director of the Powers Museum, hosted a workshop for public school teachers in the Carthage area in the fall of 2006. This workshop helped teachers integrate the exhibit into their class curriculum.
From August through December 2006, this exhibit was on display in the new Thomas Eagleton U.S. District Courthouse in St. Louis. The exhibit proved to be so popular with judges, lawyers, and courthouse visitors that it will be displayed at the U.S. District Courthouse in Kansas City in the spring of 2008. Once again, selections from The Verdict of History were on display at the Missouri Supreme Court building last spring where they became an important part of the Court’s annual tours for thousands of schoolchildren.
Ticket to the Past, the First Twenty-Five Years of the Missouri State Fair
The updated version opened to the public in the Kirkpatrick State Information Center in March 2006, began traveling in September 2006 and remains popular with the public. It has traveled to seven venues in Moberly, Kirkwood, Hannibal, Marshall, and Poplar Bluff and is scheduled for showings into the fall of 2009.
Lewis and Clark Across Missouri
The exhibit finished a stunning and successful four-year tour of the state. During its travels, the exhibit stopped at over 100 sites and was visited by more than 150,000 people.
Missouri Memories: A History in Photographs
This permanent exhibit of historic photographs was installed throughout the Kirkpatrick State Information Center’s hallways in FY07.
Cooper School in Atchison County, Missouri- 1891.
The images on display were selected from the Archives' collection of almost 500,000 photographs covering over 100 years of Missouri history. The pictures show aspects of old-time agricultural practices and small-town life, the building of the Bagnell Dam and the emergence of Lake of the Ozarks as a tourist attraction and the history of transportation in Missouri, from steamboats to the "modern" automobile assembly lines of the 1950s.
Programming and Education
As part of its Thursday Evening Speaker Series in FY07, the Archives presented twelve programs, free and open to the public. Some of the most well attended programs of the year included:
Arrow Rock: Crossroads of the Missouri Frontier, a program about the state’s oldest historic site, from its rise to prominence on the frontier to its current role as a National Historic Landmark, presented by author and Arrow Rock site administrator Michael Dickey.
Listening to the Still Small Voice: The Story of George Washington Carver, the one-person play written and performed by Paxton J. Williams revealing the story of Carver’s lifelong struggles and triumphs.
Antiques Appraisal Show, aided by experts from Ivey-Selkirk Auctioneers and Appraisers, patrons received professional opinions on the worth of antiques, works of art, and collectibles from some of the best in the business.
Folk Arts Festival, held in Jefferson City’s Memorial Park, provided an opportunity for people of all ages to view live demonstrations of traditional basket weaving, wood carving, loom weaving and chair caning. Nearly 300 spectators enjoyed shopping for traditional crafts while listening to performances of Native American flute music, blues, and old time fiddle tunes.
Additional programming on Conservation and Preservation of Family Documents was presented by Archives’ staff in two hands-on workshops. The programs celebrated the Archives’ annual Family History Day with informative and in-depth sessions on conservation and preservation skills that can be performed at home. A total of 1,171 people attended the combined public programs.
The Archives is also working to make its monthly programs available online and many programs, complete with transcripts, are already available online at http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/about/presentations.asp.
Archives Alive!
"Molly and Delores" talk about famous Missourians.
In 2007, from March to May, 4,836 elementary students from across the state attended performances of Archives Alive! at the Missouri State Archives. The Second Chance Foundation presented an entertaining and educational forty-minute interactive, theatrical program to both private and public school students. This program, the “Molly and Delores Show,” highlights Missouri history for fourth and fifth graders, teaching them about their heritage and the men and women who shaped Missouri. In addition to the performance, most groups toured the Archives along with scheduling visits to the Capitol, the Governor’s Mansion, and other Jefferson City attractions. Archives Alive! performances and tours were provided free of charge.
Online Lesson Plans
As part of its focus to provide educators and students with original documents related to the teaching of Missouri history, the Archives staff has added two additional online lesson plans in FY07. Using curricula based on Archives collections, and available online, educators and students can experience the history contained in original records, and develop a greater appreciation for the rich heritage of Missouri through these web-based lesson plans:
Crack of the Pistol: Dueling in 19th Century Missouri
This lesson, developed for ninth through twelfth grade students, introduces students to primary sources that teach them about the role dueling played in the social and political dynamics of nineteenth century Missouri.
Man’s Best Friend: The Old Drum Story
This lesson, developed for eighth through twelfth grade students, introduces students to primary sources that teach about the judicial system and describes one of the most unusual cases to enter Missouri courts.
These and other online lessons explain the content and value of original documents to Missouri's history and help educators incorporate primary sources into their curriculum.
National History Day in Missouri
The Missouri State Archives sponsors the Central Missouri Region National History Day in Missouri competition. This contest is held each year on the last Saturday of February at Lewis and Clark Middle School in Jefferson City. The top three finishers in each category are eligible to participate in the state contest at the University of Missouri-Columbia in April. First and second place finishers at the National History Day in Missouri competition proceed to the National History Day competition at the University of Maryland-College Park in June.
Competing individually or in small groups, in either the junior division, for grades 6-8, or the senior division, for grades 9-12, National History Day students choose their own research topics based on an annual theme. The theme this year was Triumph and Tragedy in History. Project formats range from traditional research papers to performances, documentaries, exhibits and websites. Two students from central Missouri qualified for the national competition.
Projects
The Mary Alice Hansen Postcard Collection
Mary Alice Hansen was a Minnesota postcard collector who traveled extensively in Missouri. Her nephew, David Quick, donated 209 color and black and white postcards his aunt had collected to the Archives in 2001. The images document Missouri buildings, industry, and culture from the early twentieth century and include Springfield, St. Louis, and St. Charles, in addition to many of Missouri’s smaller communities. Of particular interest are the photographic postcards covering the Branson area and the Missouri Ozarks. In FY07, this collection became the first of many small postcard collections the Archives will mount online so that patrons can view Missouri’s historic landscape in what is still a very popular image format.
The Missouri State Archives and the Missouri State Library have worked together to create Missouri Digital Heritage (MDH), a partnership between the Office of the Secretary of State, local governments, public libraries, and community institutions. Funded by the Missouri General Assembly, this joint venture will digitize millions of pages of Missouri’s most significant historical collections, including, not just documents, but photographs, maps, and other materials, beginning in FY08.
The Archives and State Library both have a long history of making resources available online and helping repositories across Missouri to do the same. Examples of some of the Archives most popular online resources include: the Missouri Death Certificate Database, which has a searchable index of all death records from 1910-1957, along with images of many of the original documents; the Soldiers Database, with individual service cards from the War of 1812 to World War I; a collection of African-American portraits from 1880-1920; and the Civil War Provost Marshal Index Database, 1861-1866.
One of the focal projects for Missouri Digital Heritage is to digitize the state’s Civil War records, in preparation for the sesquicentennial of the war in 2011. This will include not only the court cases, maps, and other resources held at the Missouri State Archives, but local records related to the Civil War and slavery that exist in counties throughout the state. We encourage you to watch us grow at www.MissouriDigitalHeritage.com.
In 1838, years of escalating tension between Missouri’s Mormon and non-Mormon settlers erupted into a brief, but vicious, military confrontation, commonly referred to as the “Mormon War.” The events leading up to and following this era in Missouri history are recorded in documents held at the Missouri State Archives, all of which are now available online.
Over 700 pages of original documents related to these events are available through the State Archives website. Completed with the help of the Genealogical Society of Utah and the St. Louis Mercantile Library, the Missouri Mormon War website contains transcripts of all the handwritten documents and is searchable by keyword.
Also included on the website are Governor Boggs’ “Extermination Order,” the criminal hearing of Joseph Smith and other church leaders for treason and other crimes, correspondence from military officers in the field, the report of the legislative joint committee appointed to investigate “disturbances” between Mormons and non-Mormons and petitions from settlers on both sides asking for protection and relief from loss of property. To learn more about Missouri’s role in early Mormon history and the religion’s impact on the state, please visit the website at http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/mormon.asp.
New Docent Program Provides Archives Tours
In 2007, a new docent program proved of inestimable help to the Archives staff by providing many of the tours normally led by full-time staff.
Volunteers gave over 70 tours at the Archives in FY07. The generous donation of their time enabled the Missouri State Archives staff to devote more of its energy to responding to research requests and making historical records available to the public. For more about the docent program visit:
http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/newsletter/2007_summer.pdf
Conferences
The Archives participated in three academic conferences during the past year. The first was the 49thAnnual Missouri Conference on History where one session was devoted to nineteenth-century circuit court records. A panel of archivists from the Missouri State Archives spoke about the new information researchers are gleaning from circuit court records in Missouri.
The Missouri Mormon Experience: A Conference of History and Commemoration was co-sponsored with the Columbia Missouri Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This conference consisted of a weekend of activities commemorating Missouri’s role in early Mormon history and the religion’s impact on the state. See http://www.bycommon
consent.com/2006/09/the-missouri-mormon-experience-a-conference-report/ and http://www.meridianmagazine.com/churchhistory/060918missouri.html for information about the speakers at this conference.
The Archives also commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Dred Scott case by participating in Washington University’s symposium The Dred Scott Case and Its Legacy: Race, Law, and the Struggle for Equality, in addition to special events held at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.
Fellowships and Internships
In FY07, the Archives and the Friends of the Missouri State Archives embarked on a new initiative, the William E. Foley Research Fellowship. This initiative goes beyond providing access to Missouri’s historical documents by supplying the means necessary to ensure the use of those resources for scholarly research. Any project that uses the Archives holdings to further knowledge of state or national history is eligible for funding.
Two fellowships were awarded in 2007. Adam Arenson, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, is completing his dissertation, entitled “America’s Barometer: The Cultural Politics of St. Louis as National City, 1848-1877.” According to Arenson, his project “describes the visions of the nation put forward in St. Louis, the challenges faced, and how the fate of this fascinating city resonated with the path of the nation as a whole.”
Dr. Bonnie Stepenoff, a professor at Southeast Missouri State University, researched a book-length manuscript on homeless boys in St. Louis from 1860-1960. The book will reveal the stories of these boys: what brought about their plight, the condition of their lives in group-homes, their involvement in organized crime and their ultimate fate.
This year marked the ninth year of a highly successful partnership with the Supreme Court of Missouri Historical Society. Each year the Archives and the Supreme Court of Missouri Historical Society sponsor two internships and the Robert Eldridge Seiler Fellowship at the Archives. Each year the interns work on the long-term project to develop an annotated, sustainable, online database for Missouri’s Supreme Court case files. This year the interns added cases from the Reconstruction period to the database, bringing the total to 10,201 case files. This database is available at www.sos.mo.gov/archives/judiciary/
supreme
court/.
The Seiler Fellowship was awarded to Diane Mutti Burke, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. Dr. Burke conducted her research in court records related to slavery and slaveholding in Missouri for her book, On Slavery’s Borders: Small Slaveholding in Antebellum Missouri.
Database to Missouri’s Court Records Available Online
Missouri has one of the most significant judicial history collections in the nation. The new Missouri Court Records Database provides access to records that reveal details about the state’s famous people, like Daniel Boone, Thomas Hart Benton, and James Eads; and significant events, including the Civil War, trade to the Rocky Mountains, operation of steamboats, and creation of railroads.
Cases range from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, with some early documents written in French or Spanish, reflecting the state’s colonial roots. Together, they reveal the courageous spirit of Missourians: the story of German immigrants who risked traveling far from home for a better life, fur traders who dared to forge across the untamed American West and slaves who sought freedom from a system that oppressed them.
A project of this magnitude is not possible without the help of many people. Hundreds of volunteers, in association with local governments, libraries, universities, and civic organizations, worked thousands of hours to help make Missouri’s judicial history available. To learn more about the Missouri Judicial Records Database, please visit www.sos.mo.gov/archives/judiciary/allcourts/default.asp.
Awards
The Archives received an Award of Merit in recognition of the Missouri Death Certificate Database in 2007. Given by the American Association for State and Local History's (AASLH) Leadership in History Awards Program, this is the nation's most prestigious award for recognition of achievement in state and local history.
The Missouri Death Certificate Database is the most ambitious online project ever completed by the Missouri State Archives. The database contains over two million death certificates from 1910-1956 that are searchable by name, county, month and year. In addition, digital images of the original certificates from 1910-1934 and 1945-1957 are available online, with more years soon to come. This is the third time the Missouri State Archives has received recognition from the AASLH for being a national leader.
The Missouri State Archives website was recognized as one of the nation's finest resources for family history research. The list of the 101 best websites was compiled by Family Tree Magazine, America’s largest-circulation genealogy magazine. This is the fifth year the Missouri State Archives has been recognized by Family Tree Magazine, having been named every year since 2003.
State Document Preservation Fund
The State Documents Preservation Fund was created in 1996 by the 88th General Assembly through Senate Bill 670. The fund supports the preservation of and access to documents of historical value by permitting the State Archives to obtain additional funds from private and corporate sources. At the close of June 2007, the fund balance was $13,852.25.
Missouri Historical Records Advisory Board
The Missouri Historical Records Advisory Board (MHRAB) is the central advisory body for historical records planning and for projects relating to historic records that are developed and carried out within the state. The MHRAB provides state-level appraisal of grant proposals submitted to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) by Missouri repositories and serves as the review and award panel for grant applications submitted to the Missouri State Archives Local Records Grant Program.
During the year, the MHRAB evaluated Missouri grant proposals submitted to the NHPRC. The MHRAB also reviewed sixty-four proposals submitted to the Local Records Grant Program. Of these, forty-four grants, for a total of $355,674, were awarded to local government agencies for approved records management or preservation projects. In addition, the board revised the guidelines of the Local Records Grant Program to expand funding for judicial records projects.
The Governor, with the advice and consent of the Senate, appoints members to the MHRAB. As the Board's coordinator, the Secretary of State handles its administrative responsibilities. Federal regulations require members to have experience and interest in the collection, administration and use of historical records, and a dedication to the preservation of and access to Missouri's documented heritage.
Robin Carnahan |
Kenneth H. Winn |
Joseph L. Adams |
Gary R. Kremer |
Gracia Backer |
Robert P. Neumann |
Marcia Bennett |
David Richards, Head |
Raymond Doswell |
Anne G. Rottmann |
Steven P. Gietschier |
Dr. Benedict K. Zobrist |
Christopher Gordon |
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