The Kansas Historical Society has partnered with Ancestry.com to make thousands of pages of records available for free to Kansans with a valid driver’s license.  While Ancestry’s primary interest is genealogical, the records that have been added to date can be used to study local communities, farming, and military service in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I as well as numerous other topics.

Through this partnership, Ancestry has digitized the Kansas State Census records taken every ten years from 1865-1925 in years ending in 5.  This state census provides coverage for the entire state by listing all members of families, their ages, sex, and often other information about where they were born, where they lived before coming to Kansas, and if they served in the military during the Civil War.  Because this census was taken by the Kansas Board of Agriculture, there is also a section that provides information on agricultural production farm by farm.

Ancestry has also digitized these records series and other record series will be added as they are available:

Civil War Enlistment Papers of Kansas Volunteer Regiments, 1862, 1863, 1868

Russell County Vital and Probate Records (J. C. Ruppenthal Collection)

World War I, Kansas Veterans, Manuscript Collection no. 49

United Spanish-American War Veterans, Reports of Deaths, 1945-1970 (TAPS)

If you are a Kansan with a valid driver’s license, check out the Kansas Historical Society records now available through our Ancestry partnership.  This page also lists additional records series the Ancestry plans to digitize and make available via this portal.

This partnership allows us to make significantly more records available to Kansas via the internet than what we could accomplish with in-house digitization.  The Kansas Historical Society is committed to providing easy access to as many of our research holdings as possible.  The partnership with Ancestry, Kansas Memory, and Chronicling America are the three ways Kansans can access thousands of documents from their homes or anyplace where they have internet access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Samuel J. Reader arrived in Indianola, Shawnee County, Kansas in 1855. As an adult, his occupation was farming but he was a man of many talents and interesting hobbies. He was an avid diarist, drawer and painter until his death at the age of 78. Among his collection available at the Kansas Historical Society are his lantern slides.

Each slide is made from hand-painted glass cased in a handmade wooden frame. The slides depict a variety of subjects including ghastly creatures, like Satan and the Grim Reaper, flowers, people and animals.

Reader used a type of image projector commonly known as the magic lantern to showcase his works of art for members of the community. Lantern slides were first introduced in 1849. By the time Reader began creating his own slides in 1866, they would have been a popular form of entertainment.