Hunting and fishing were important to the daily lives of Minnesota’s early residents as a source of food and income. For the most part, pioneers could hunt and fish all they wanted as very little regulation existed that addressed “taking”…
University Archives underwent an office remodel last week. File cabinets were moved across the room, cubicles were deconstructed, shifted, and rebuilt. At one point during all of the commotion, one of the movers found an interesting item… – Envelope from…
In February of 1916, Thomas Sadler Roberts, associate curator of the Zoological Museum, released the first of what he termed “Occasional Papers,” a series of bulletins issued from the “Zoological Division of the Geological and Natural History Survey.” The content…
As we shared in a blog post a few months ago, the University’s “General Museum” – the museum established by the 1872 act that created the state Geological and Natural History Survey – started humbly. It wasn’t until three years…
As I mentioned yesterday, dozens of negatives in the Bell Museum records aren’t about nature, but are of a personal nature as they contain images of Thomas Sadler Roberts’s family. The presence of family portraits amongst portraits of birds and…
Associate Curator and Director were not the only titles that Thomas Sadler Roberts held during his tenure at the University of Minnesota. Beginning in 1916, just one year after he started at the U, Roberts also added the title of…
What they did before Google… Question C.D. Velie to Thomas Sadler Roberts, December 8, 1921: My Dear Doctor: I have two carrier pigeons, mounted, on my desk here at the office, which you can have if you will send over…
Are you sick of glass plate negatives yet? I certainly do post a lot about them. The fact is I spend the better part of my day looking at the scanned images of the negatives, deciphering the hand-written notations on…
As I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, holding a wet washcloth to my forehead in an attempt to reduce my fever, I remembered a series of letters I read last week from the correspondence files of the…
In the Annals of the Museum of Natural History 1872-1939, Thomas Sadler Roberts, museum director, listed the following entry for January 20, 1928 on a detailed timeline of museum activities and milestones: An original double elephant folio edition of John…