The Research Center has a rich variety of materials available for use by visitors. The Historical Society has resources that may be of use to help genealogists researching their family history in Rock County.
Research on site is free.
If you want us to do the research, contact the Historical Society at (507) 283-2122 or rcmuseum@gmail.com with your request for help. Depending on volunteer help available, we will do our best to give you a timely response. Research is charged at the rate of $10/hour.
A partial list of the information you can find at the History Center:
- Notebook Archives: The Research Center has a unique archive of articles from the newspapers, sorted by topic. Volunteers have spent many hours making copies of old newspapers, cutting out articles and then filing them in a notebook according to topic – noting the publication and date of the article. We now have over 800 notebooks on different topics. If you are interested in a particular topic, say the Suffrage movement in Rock County, there is a notebook that contains the applicable articles from area newspapers, sorted chronologically. These notebooks also contain applicable documents, stories or photos that have been donated to the Historical Society.
- Obituaries from the early 1870s to present – a card catalog contains obituaries from local newspapers, sorted alphabetically.
- History books
- Cemetery records
- County Assessor Records – all county assessor records from ____through 1960 are stored at the History Center.
- Church records – notebooks containing information about the existing and vanished churches in Rock County are available
- Club & Organization Records
- Family history files
- Area newspapers – Original newspapers from 1873 to 1942 are available for the Rock County Herald and some of the newspapers from the smaller towns.
- Photographs – the photo collection includes historical photos that have been donated. In addition many of the negatives from Myhre’s photography studio are stored at the History Center. Also all negatives for photographs in the Rock County Star Herald are here. Aerial photographs of all land in Rock County are available; these pictures were taken by EROS.
- Plat books – several plat books are available, the oldest being the 1874 book.
- Maps –
- Country School Records – information on the 75+ county schools is available.
- Telephone books
- Yearbooks – many yearbooks from the following schools are here: Luverne, Hills-Beaver Creek, Beaver Creek, Hills, Magnolia and Hardwick.
- Plus much, much more
Other resources in Luverne include:
- Herreid Military Museum – honoring all who have served (located at 213 E Luverne St).
- Rock County Courthouse – Birth and death records, marriage licenses, property records, etc. (located at 204 E Brown St)
