Bob Dylan’s father leads a dance in Duluth, The Duluth Herald, October 28, 1931.

The free, open access, online Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub, supported by recently cut grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, lets you do your own deep dives into genealogy, the history of a home or business, or just about anything that has happened in Duluth or throughout Minnesota. This month’s deep dive shows you how the site works by using Bob Dylan’s Duluth family history as an example.

Since 2007, the Minnesota Historical Society has been making old Minnesota newspapers available online through the Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub. Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities have allowed the newspaper’s offerings available to everyone online to expand substantially over the past few years. The archive now includes 857 Minnesota newspapers published since 1849, when Minnesota became a territory. The online portion of the archive primarily, but not exclusively, focuses on historical editions, as copyright issues can limit online access for anything published after 1977. The “Map Search” tab at the top of the page shows the city of publication for each newspaper in the archive. The Duluth newspapers that are searchable online include the following:

The Duluth Herald: 1878-1966
The Duluth Minnesotian: 1869-1878
The Duluth Rip-Saw: 1917-1924
The Labor World: 1896-1922
Narodni Vestnik [National herald – a Slovenian paper]: 1911 – 1914
Truth [a socialist paper]: 1917-1922
The World [a Black-owned newspaper]: 1896-1897

The archive also includes Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and German language newspapers, among others, that covered news throughout the state. The archive also recently expanded the number of indigenous newspapers, including The Tomahawk (1903-1922) and Ni-mi-kwa-zoo-min [Speaking of Ourselves] (1974-1977).

All of these papers have been scanned in high resolution, and, more importantly, are fully searchable. How much I could find in these archives surprised me a bit.

Family History

In looking for information on my own family, I quickly realized that old newspapers, particularly before the 1950s, functioned quite a bit like Instagram does today. People from the community would send in short notices of not only weddings and deaths but trips they had taken, parties held at their house, or people that visited from out of town. Because the archive has a nearly complete record of many of these early newspapers, the archive is a bit different from other sources: the earlier a person was born, the more information you can often find. I found 144 references related to my great-great grandparents. This included picnics at the lake, jury duty, elections and re-elections to Norwegian civic organizations, a summer trip back to the home country, an outing to the Lyceum Theater, and visits to a brother that moved from Norway to Canada still has descendants just on the other side of the border. Another branch of the family came over from Finland to work a farm outside of Duluth. The paper has very little to say about them. And I suppose that is what makes searching for relatives in the archives such a suspenseful process. Sometimes the results were not so interesting. Sometimes they changed how I thought of my family history.

A search for articles about Bob Dylan’s father, arranged by publication date.

There a number of things you can do to increase your chances of finding a few gems within the massive amount of information available. As Bob Dylan is a public figure who has been written about quite extensively, he will be used as an example here. Born in Duluth as Robert Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, his family has a long history in Northern Minnesota.

Searching for his father, Abram Zimmerman, gives eight results, and only four are from Duluth and within his lifetime. Based on the only interview Bob Dylan’s parents gave together, in which his father spoke extensively about growing up in Duluth, all of the four results seem to be from his life, including honor role lists and his marriage license application on June 4, 1934. Changing the search term to Abe Zimmerman, however, increases the number of results to 65, providing information about his participation in dances, plays, and the Duluth baseball league in which he met his future wife during an away game in Hibbing. When a search returns a large number of results, I find it helpful to change the result order from “Relevance” to “Publication Date.” Every search result seems relevant and ordering by publication date helps create shape a narrative over time and makes the connections between results more apparent, like a classified ad running for a week or updates on a court case that lasted for several months.

Articles related to Abe Zimmeran.

When searching for Abe Zimmerman, many of the results actually relate to Bob Dylan’s mother, Beatrice, due to the convention at the time of referring to married women by their husband’s name. The archives show her as part of Duluth party organizing committees, taking trips to Hibbing, and, after the permanent move to Hibbing, returning to Duluth for a wedding. Pre-fame Bob Dylan himself only seems to appear twice in the Duluth Herald archives, both related to family visits to Hibbing.

Articles featuring Beatrice Zimmerman and the Zimmerman family.

It is always difficult to know if you have found everything. Using an additional search tool brings up at least one new result.  Adding a search term and then using the “near” function lets you see results where the two terms are close to together on the same page. In this case, searching for “Zimmerman,” adding the additional term “Abe,” and searching for pages where these are near each other brings up 102 results. Limiting these only to the Duluth Herald reduces these to 58. Most are the same as in the simple search for “Abe Zimmerman”, but it also includes a missed result for Abe H. Zimmerman in the announcement of Bob Dylan’s birth.

Using the “near” function to find Bob Dylan’s birth announcement.

The near function can also be quite useful when looking for someone with a very common name. Because of his unusual name, Bob Dylan’s paternal grandfather, Zigman Zimmerman, is easy to find. But his maternal grandfather, Ben Stone, gives 191 results, many of which seem to be related to other Ben Stones. If you search for “Ben Stone” near Hibbing, it reduces the number of results to three, including notice of the Stone family taking a trip to Hibbing from nearby Stevenson, Minnesota, a small mining town later swallowed up by the mines where the Stone family originally lived. Searching for Ben Stone near Stevenson brings up 26 results.

Zigman Zimmerman’s obituary in the Duluth Herald.

Home and Business History

A friend of mine recently bought a house on Park Point and researching the history of his home gave me a better understanding of how much residential history is in the old newspapers. We found not only every previous family that once occupied his home and some of the more remarkable events of their lives, but also that his home was designed by a notable Duluth architect and holds a very particular place in Duluth history (a likely subject for a future Duluth Deep Dive).

Because people’s addresses were often provided next to their names, an address search often reveals the former occupants of a Duluth home (the Duluth city directories are also useful for matching names with addresses). Just like relatives, sometimes there is a wealth of information and sometimes very little comes back. My childhood home only produces three hits, all classified ads from between 1918 and 1921: the sale of a bench wringer for washing clothes, a notice of a purple coat lost from an automobile, and a listing for a black satin dress, size 36, worn 3 times.

Comparing information in the St. Louis County Land Explorer with the newspaper archives.

When Bob Dylan was born, his family lived at 519 Third Avenue East, sharing an alley with Albert Woolson, later the last surviving Civil War veteran. When looking into the history of any home, I find the St. Louis County Land Explorer a good place to start, as it provides the construction year of every home in Duluth. This allows any results before the house existed to be ignored. The information in the land explorer seems generally accurate but not always. Bob Dylan’s childhood home is listed as being constructed in 1909 but one of the results that comes up when searching for “519 Third Avenue East” is a description of the house construction plans from March 13, 1915. Other than this construction notice, the archives do not seem to have much other information about the home or who lived in it.

Just like family names, however, using different variations can make a big difference. Shortening the address from “519 Third Avenue East” to “519 3rd Ave E” increases the number of results from 18 to 1,543. This is not a mistake. Using the abbreviated version of the address brings up listings from the classifieds that charged by the number of characters. The occupant of the home before the Zimmermans, Oscar Goldfine, was a livestock dealer. He placed an ad in the classifieds nearly every day in the late 1920s and 1930s. For the period in which the Zimmermans live in the home, two classifieds were published in late March 1941 requesting someone to help with housework. Bob Dylan was born two months later.

Classified ads through the years for 519 Third Ave. E.

Browsing the archives

Browsing the archives for things to do in Duluth on January 31, 1959.

The archives can, of course, be used for more than just learning about the history of a family or a place. Any notable event in Duluth history can be found simply by browsing the archives based on the date. For example, Bob Dylan has often spoke of the influence of seeing Buddy Holly perform at the Duluth Armory on January 31, 1959. You can find an ad for that show by locating the Duluth Herald from that date and searching for “Armory” within the paper. And on that page, you can see how musical history might have been a bit different if Bob Dylan had chosen instead to go see the Tamburitzans at the Hotel Holland. Buddy Holly died in a plane crash three days later. The Tamburitzans are still going strong.

A further tangent might involve looking into the people listed alongside Bob Dylan’s family. If you wanted to know more about the Laukkonen family listed near the Stone’s in the Duluth Herald from June 8, 1918, the search would lead to an article in Uusi Kotimaa [New Homeland], a Finnish language paper published in New York Mills, Minnesota, between 1884-1934. If you don’t’ speak Finnish, you can use the text clipping tool to highlight the relevant text. This will bring a pop-up with text that you can cut and paste as well as a button that will bring you directly to Google translate. You can also save pages as PDFs with “Add Page to Print Bundle” button on the right side of the bottom task bar if you want to upload the page for translations elsewhere or just keep a copy for yourself. In this case, the text says, “Representatives Puro and Laukkonen proposed, in the name of the socialists, that the proposal be rejected.”

You can translate from other languages from within the site or save a PDF to be read by another translation program.

It’s very easy to have searches lead to other searches. For example, searching for Bob Dylan’s grandfather in Stevenson led to a story of him owning a shop called Cohen & Stone that burned down in 1921, possibly by a thief who worked as a butcher who some years earlier got into a fist fight on the streets of Eveleth. Just a year later, a store with the same name, Cohen & Stone, opened in downtown Duluth, suggesting Bob Dylan may have had Duluth connections on both sides of his family (even if the store name is coincidental, there are multiple references of trips by Ben Stone of Stevenson to Duluth).

The Stone family in Northern Minnesota and Duluth.

Keeping track of all these different searches can be tricky. Fortunately, the website lets you save searches without making an account. Simply click on the “Save/Manage Search” button in the upper left corner and give the search a name. Saving searches and downloading pages allows you to keep what you have found. Developing a system for organizing the information found within the newspaper archives is its own separate challenge, a task made more complicated by the wealth of information available.

In a later interview, Bob Dylan’s mother Beatty quoted her late husband as saying, “You read the paper, then you put it in the fireplace,” suggesting the limited, transient value of what you find in a newspaper. Washington Post publisher publisher Philip Graham had a different idea and described newspapers as the “the first rough draft of history.” In a case like Bob Dylan, where newspaper articles supplement countless other sources on his life and legacy, this seems true enough. For families without world famous relatives, it’s a bit different. Last year, my great-aunt died at the age of 100. She was the last person with living memories of our relatives that came to northern Minnesota from Sweden and Norway. In an oral history, she recalled their general personalities and a few family get togethers, but of course not the scores of baseball games and their roles in local civic organizations. Going through the 144 references to my great-great grandparents in the archives created a more complex view of how their lives unfolded. For so many who have lived in Northern Minnesota, these records are not the first rough draft of history. They are the only record that remains.

This month’s Geoguessr features location associated with Bob Dylan’s childhood in Northern Minnesota. Each round lasts five minutes.

Geoguessr Challenge: Bob Dylan in Northern Minnesota

More information on how to play Geoguessr can be found here.