Our Advice for

Catholic Research in Minnesota

The Chancery of the Archdiocese of St. Paul & Minneapolis has many church records on microfilm and available for research, including those for Immaculate Conception, which was the church for which St. Mary's Cemetery was created. You must make an appointment to visit the Chancery, which is located a few blocks away from the Minnesota History Center. The Chancery increased their research fee from $15 to $30 per visit (2005-8).

A copy of the Immaculate Conception microfilm is available at the Minnesota Genealogical Society. Many other Catholic Church records for central Minnesota are also available there. See www.mngs.org/catholic/stpaul1.shtml for a comprehensive list of parishes are records available for the Archdiocese of St. Paul, and the dates for which records are available. (The original source for the information you'll see there is the Archdiocese Archives library catalog.)

MGS charges a small daily fee for non-members - please support MGS, as these are valuable resource materials.

If you're looking for records for Catholic churches outside the Archdiocese, contact the church directly. It may be helpful to use a search engine such as Google to find the church website. You may be able to contact the church secretary via email, which makes for a faster answer to the question about the who & where to contact.

Minnesota Death Certificates are available from copies of Vital Records microfilm, available at the Minnesota Historical Society in the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. They have a wonderful online index of death certificates starting with 1906. You can order death certificates online. *Note

If you don't know the death date, a search of City Directories directories can help you narrow your search. The Minnesota Historical Society has many on film, and the Minnesota Genealogical Society has a good collection of the original books (you can't take photocopies of these because the paper has deteriorated badly).

If you are searching for information about an Irish ancestor from the Midwest during the late 1870s to the early 1920s we highly recommend The Irish Standard, a weekly newspaper published from St. Paul during this period. We have found many helpful notices (usually marriages or deaths, births were rarely reported), including the Dakotas, greater Minnesota, and Irish in the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. We were delighted to find our grandmother's 1908 high school piano recital reported in detail!)

Issues are on microfilm at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul.