Over the past 4+ years, as our passion and commitment to our family’s history has become apparent to everyone, we have been entrusted with more and more of the rare family documents and photos that are the scraps of what our ancestors have left behind. We are even receiving boxes of items from relatives whom we haven’t met, but who’ve heard about our work and decided there was finally a safe place where these items should reside.

One commitment we made early on was that anything that was shared with us would be properly archived and protected, and it would be made available to the entire family.

Click here to visit the entire archive: Archive Collections of An American Genealogy

The collections are broken down by whom collected the information, as follows:

• John M. Leonard Collection (Link coming soon!) – John was Michael’s paternal great uncle, and was the long-time historian of the Leonard family. He not only preserved his mother’s collection of documents, but he left behind a wealth of information about his family, his children, and the Leonard line that came before him.
• Catherine S. Leonard Collection (Link) – Born Catherine Suzette Morse in 1911, she was John’s mother, and she kept an extensive collection of her family’s papers. Her father was Congressman Elmer A. Morse from Antigo, Wisconsin, who was also a prominent businessman and local political figure long after his service in Congress ended in 1912. Her papers include many personal and direct family items, as well as items that were likely collected by her mother Myra (Tradewell) Morse, including documents that go back a generation earlier. Myra Morse was the original genealogist on this family line, and many of her original documents (and affidavits) are the sole surviving records we have have of this line.
• Ruth Ann Miller Collection (Link coming soon!) – Ruth (Morse) Miller is the most active collector of Morse family history (in this group that largely means descendants of Royal J. Morse (1801-1901), especially his sons Addison J. and James “Birney” Morse) and has published family books as a part of the bi-annual Morse Family Reunions for several decades. Mrs. Miller shared a box of documents largely relating to E.A. Morse in the summer of 2018, which makes up this collection.
• Home Portrait Studio (Racine, Wisconsin) Collection (Link) – Frank Stritesky operated the Home Portrait Studio in Racine from 1916 through his death in 1964. Frank and his wife Anne were of Bohemian ancestry, and they lived in one of the largest Bohemian neighborhoods in the US, so this collection is a great snapshot of that population as well as showing how the neighborhood changed over the nearly 50 years the studio was in operation. This collection is scans from nearly 2500 glass plate negatives that were obtained after the death of Frank’s youngest daughter. (More info on collection here)
• Personal Ancestry Records (Link coming soon!) – These are the documents, transcripts, evidence, interviews, photos, etc. that my wife and I have collected and created as we put together this “American Genealogy”.

Please enjoy this collection of documents and photos, and please check back regularly as we’re constantly working to share the 1000’s of items we’ve been gifted