Alaska Genealogy

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Alaska Genealogy Research Guide

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Alaska Genealogy Research Guide

Quick Facts

Alaska has lived under three sovereignties — Indigenous, Russian, and American — and that layered past decides where its records are kept. Russia governed the coast through the Russian-American Company until 1867; the United States then ran Alaska as a loosely administered district, later a territory, before statehood in 1959. Because it entered the Union as public land governed largely from Washington, the earliest and richest genealogical sources are federal and ecclesiastical rather than local, and the Russian Orthodox parish registers reach back a full century before civil registration began.

• Capital: Juneau. The seat of government moved from Sitka to Juneau in 1906; Anchorage is the largest city.
• Statehood: January 3, 1959, the 49th state, formed from the Territory of Alaska (1912).
• Earlier sovereignty: Russian America until the purchase of 1867; then the Department of Alaska (1867), the District of Alaska under the First Organic Act (1884), and the Territory of Alaska under the Second Organic Act (1912).
• Land type: Alaska is a federal (public-domain) land state, not a state-land state. Unclaimed land was surveyed and granted by the federal government, so original title is documented in General Land Office and Bureau of Land Management records rather than in county deed books.
• Boroughs, not counties: Alaska has no counties. It is divided into nineteen organized boroughs together with a single vast Unorganized Borough, which the Census Bureau subdivides into census areas. The borough system dates from the Borough Act of 1961; boroughs were first organized in 1963, and the most recently created is Petersburg (2013). Boroughs do not register vital records, which are handled centrally by the state.
• Nickname and motto: the Last Frontier; the state motto is North to the Future.
• Where records live: births, marriages, and deaths are held by the state; territorial court, probate, land, and governors’ records are split between the Alaska State Archives and the National Archives at Seattle; original land title is federal (BLM); and the pre-1913 Russian Orthodox registers are at the Library of Congress.

Libraries and Archives

Alaska’s collections are concentrated in Juneau, the seat of state government, and in the federal repositories that hold its territorial records; university libraries, borough and city archives, and Alaska Native heritage institutions hold material for their own regions and communities. The principal repositories include:

• Alaska State Archives (Juneau) — territorial and state government records: District and Territorial court records, probate case files, naturalization indexes, land and tax records, the World War I service register, and the records of the Alaska Territorial Guard.
• Alaska State Library, Historical Collections (Juneau) — newspapers, local histories, manuscripts, photographs, and published genealogies, within the Division of Libraries, Archives & Museums.
• Alaska State Museum (Juneau) and the Sheldon Jackson Museum (Sitka) — material culture and documentary collections spanning the Russian and American periods.
• National Archives at Seattle — the federal records of the U.S. District Court for Alaska: naturalization, probate, civil, criminal, and land-entry case files, together with census and passenger records.
• University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska and Polar Regions Collections & Archives (Elmer E. Rasmuson Library) — the state’s leading research archive, with manuscripts, oral histories, the Alaska Film Archives, rare maps, and microfilm of the Russian Orthodox registers.
• University of Alaska Anchorage, Archives & Special Collections (Consortium Library) — manuscript and photograph collections for south-central Alaska.
• The Z.J. Loussac Library (Anchorage Public Library) — the state’s largest public library, with an Alaska collection and local-history holdings.
• The Alaska Historical Society and local genealogical societies compile guides and reference material for statewide and community research.
• Library of Congress, Manuscript Division — the archives of the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church, Diocese of Alaska, the single most important source for pre-1913 vital events.
• Sealaska Heritage Institute (Juneau) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Alaska Region (Anchorage) — Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian records and, respectively, Alaska Native enrollment and lineage documentation.
• The FamilySearch Library and its worldwide FamilySearch Centers hold extensive Alaska microfilm and digital collections drawn from these repositories.

Major Websites

These sites host digitized Alaska records and indexes. Subscription sites are marked ($).

• FamilySearch — free; the backbone finding aid, with the Alaska Research Wiki, catalog, and large digitized collections of vital, church, land, court, and census records.
• Ancestry ($) — Alaska vital, census, land, naturalization, passenger, and church collections.
• MyHeritage ($) — Alaska vital records, censuses, and immigration indexes.
• Findmypast ($) — an Alaska marriage index and other United States collections.
• Alaska’s Digital Archives (Vilda) — free; photographs, oral histories, maps, and documents drawn from the State Library, State Archives, museums, and university collections.
• Chronicling America — free; the Library of Congress newspaper archive, which includes a large body of digitized Alaska newspapers.
• Internet Archive and HathiTrust — free; digitized Alaska histories, published record abstracts, territorial codes, and session laws.
• Find a Grave and BillionGraves — free; cemetery listings, photographs, and transcriptions.

Law and Government

Alaska’s early statutes explain the courts and offices that created its records, and the foundational texts have largely been digitized and are free to read.

• The First Organic Act of 1884 extended the general laws of Oregon to the District of Alaska, so early legal procedure followed Oregon practice; the act itself and the Second Organic Act of 1912 are reprinted in the compiled territorial codes.
• The early codifications — Carter’s Annotated Alaska Codes (1900), the companion Boone compilation of the political, civil, and civil-procedure codes (1900), and the Charlton Compilation of the Acts of Congress and Treaties Relating to Alaska (1906) — are digitized on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust.
• The Compiled Laws of the Territory of Alaska (1913) was the first territorial code; the annual Session Laws of Alaska begin with the first territorial legislature of 1913 and are digitized on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust.
• The Alaska Court System’s guide to prestatehood statutes maps the organic acts, codes, and session laws to their published volumes, a useful roadmap for citing the right law for a given year.
• The Alaska State Archives holds the territorial legislative records and the papers of the district and territorial governors.

Vital Records (Birth, Marriage, Death)

Territorial registration of births, marriages, and deaths began in 1913, but compliance was uneven and did not become general until about 1945, so many earlier events were never recorded by a government office. The state office holds a scattering of records from the 1890s, but the bulk of its collection dates from 1930 onward. Boroughs do not keep vital records and no Alaska city runs a separate system, so all civil registration is centralized at the state.

Where the records are held. Records from 1913 forward are held by the state’s Health Analytics & Vital Records section (formerly the Bureau of Vital Statistics). Under state law all records are confidential until they become public — births after 100 years, and deaths, marriages, and divorces after 50 years — with earlier access limited to the persons named and their representatives; a fee and identification are required. Divorces before 1950 are obtained from the clerk of the Superior Court in the judicial district where the decree was granted, and from 1950 forward from the state. The best pre-1913 substitutes are the Russian Orthodox parish registers described below. Use these online indexes to identify a record, then order the certificate:

• Alaska, Vital Records, 1816–1959 — free on FamilySearch; an incomplete but broad index and image set drawn from the Alaska State Archives, including many church-derived entries.
• Alaska, U.S., Vital Records, 1818–1963 ($), also indexed on MyHeritage ($).
• The Alaska State Archives’ Vital Statistics name index is a free searchable spreadsheet covering many early births, marriages, and deaths.

History and Timeline of Major Events

Key dates that shaped Alaska’s jurisdictions and records:

• 1741 — The Bering–Chirikov expedition makes the first documented European contact with Alaska.
• 1784 — The first permanent Russian settlement is founded at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island.
• 1799 — The Russian-American Company receives its imperial charter to govern and exploit the colony.
• 1804 — New Archangel (Sitka) is established and soon becomes the colonial capital.
• 1816 — The earliest surviving Russian Orthodox parish registers begin.
• 1867 — The United States purchases Alaska from Russia; the transfer takes place at Sitka on October 18, and the Department of Alaska is created.
• 1884 — The First Organic Act creates the District of Alaska, extends the laws of Oregon, and seats a U.S. District Court at Sitka.
• 1885 — The first federal land office opens at Sitka.
• 1896–1899 — The Klondike gold rush draws stampeders through Alaska, followed by the Nome strike of 1899.
• 1902 — Gold is discovered near Fairbanks, opening the Tanana Valley.
• 1906 — The capital is moved from Sitka to Juneau; Alaska gains a nonvoting delegate to Congress; the Alaska Native Allotment Act is passed.
• 1912 — The Second Organic Act creates the Territory of Alaska.
• 1913 — The territorial legislature first convenes, and statewide registration of births, marriages, and deaths begins.
• 1942–1943 — Japanese forces bomb Dutch Harbor and occupy Attu and Kiska; the Alaska Territorial Guard is organized, and Attu is retaken in 1943.
• 1959 — Alaska is admitted as the 49th state on January 3.
• 1964 — The Good Friday earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in North America, strikes south-central Alaska.
• 1968 — Oil is discovered at Prudhoe Bay.
• 1971 — The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) is signed into law.
• 1977 — The Trans-Alaska Pipeline is completed.

Census Records and Substitutes

Federal censuses reliably cover Alaska from 1900 onward, taken in 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, and 1950; because of weather and travel, several were enumerated months ahead of the official date. They are free on FamilySearch and the National Archives 1950 site, and are searchable on Ancestry ($) and MyHeritage ($). The 1900 and 1910 Alaska schedules asked Native respondents about tribe and clan.

Alaska took no state censuses. In their place stand a scatter of federal special enumerations and local counts, and the earliest general schedules are largely lost:

• 1870 and the early district counts: Sitka was enumerated in 1870, 1879, and 1881, and St. George Island in 1881; the Aleutian villages of Belkovsky, Nikolaevsk, and Morzhovoi were counted in 1878.
• 1880 and 1890: the special schedules taken under the Tenth and Eleventh Censuses did not survive, except for a rediscovered fragment — the logbook of special agent Frank Lowell for the 1890 Alaska census — and parts of the Sitka area.
• Point Barrow and the Pribilofs: Cape Smyth and Point Barrow were enumerated in 1885, and the fur-seal islands of St. Paul and St. George were counted repeatedly around the turn of the century.
• 1907: a partial territorial census was taken in some districts.

Census substitutes. The Alaska, U.S., Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1870–1907 ($) gathers many of these early lists into one index. For Alaska Native communities, the Alaska, Village Census Rolls, 1919–1972 are a free Bureau of Indian Affairs enumeration on FamilySearch. Where enumerations are missing, the Russian Orthodox parish registers, the Polk Alaska-Yukon Gazetteer and Business Directory (from 1901), and mining-district records are the best tools for placing a family in a given year and place.

Church Records

Because civil registration began so late, church records are the essential substitute for vital records before the twentieth century, and in Alaska that means, above all, the Russian Orthodox Church — the earliest and long the dominant church, whose registers of baptisms, marriages, deaths, and confessions record both Russian and Alaska Native families under their Christian and Native names.

• The Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church, Diocese of Alaska records at the Library of Congress span 1733–1938 and include vital statistics from 1816 to 1936; they were microfilmed in the 1980s, and researchers work from that film. A detailed finding aid describes the collection series by series.
• FamilySearch has digitized the surviving parish registers as browsable image sets for Sitka (1816–1917), Unalaska (1824–1913), Kodiak (1826–1918), Atka (1828–1898), St. Paul (1842–1923), Nushagak (1842–1931), Kenai (1845–1933), and Ikogmiut (1845–1936), together with name indexes to baptisms, marriages, and deaths covering 1867–1889, 1890–1899, and 1900–1936.
• The state vital-records office created many delayed birth certificates by borrowing and microfilming these church registers, and it also holds records of the later missions — Moravian, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Methodist.

Later missions to Alaska Natives left their own registers: the Moravians settled Bethel and the Kuskokwim, the Presbyterians (led by Sheldon Jackson) worked in the Southeast and beyond, the Jesuits established Catholic missions in the southwest and interior, and Episcopal and Methodist missions followed. For open congregations, records are held by the local church or the relevant diocesan archive.

Court Records

Alaska’s courts grew out of a frontier justice system, and their files reach well beyond lawsuits into naturalizations, estates, guardianships, and land. The main tribunals a researcher encounters are:

• Before 1884 there were no local courts; matters were tried in the federal district courts of Oregon, Washington, or California, and Oregon law governed.
• The U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska, from 1884, first sat only at Sitka; U.S. Commissioners served across the territory as both justices of the peace and probate judges.
• The court was divided into judicial divisions — three in 1903 and four from 1909 — seated at Juneau, Nome, Valdez, and Fairbanks, which produced separate runs of naturalization, probate, civil, and criminal files.
• Since statehood in 1959 the unified Alaska Court System (Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, Superior Court, and District Court) has handled probate, civil, and criminal matters.

Territorial court records are split: the Alaska State Archives holds much of the surviving material in its court record groups, while the National Archives at Seattle holds the federal case files.

Ethnic/Minority Records

Alaska has been home to distinct peoples for millennia, and knowing where a group lived points to the records most likely to document a family.

• Alaska Native peoples. The principal groups and their homelands are the Iñupiat of the Arctic north and northwest; the Yup’ik and Cup’ik of the southwest and the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta; the Unangax̂ (Aleut) of the Aleutian chain; the Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) of Kodiak, the Alaska Peninsula, and Prince William Sound; the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian of the Southeast panhandle; and the Athabascan (Dene) peoples of the interior. Enrollment and lineage records are handled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Alaska Region, which documents descent from Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act enrollees, and the BIA ANCSA program records historical and cemetery sites.
• Southeast Native records. The Sealaska Heritage Institute holds Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian family and community records, including papers of the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood.
• Village enumerations. The Alaska, Village Census Rolls, 1919–1972 on FamilySearch list Alaska Native residents community by community.
• Russians and Creoles. The colonial Russian population and the Creoles (of mixed Russian and Native descent) appear in the Russian Orthodox registers and Russian-American Company records; Creoles were offered United States citizenship after the purchase.
• Cannery and mining labor. Scandinavian, Chinese, and Filipino workers came for the salmon canneries and the gold fields; many were enumerated at their off-season homes in Washington or California, so census records there, along with court naturalization files, are often the key.

Immigration and Naturalization

Alaska had no great immigrant seaport; newcomers arrived through the Russian trade, over the gold-rush trails from Canada, and as cannery and railroad labor routed through Puget Sound. Passenger and alien-arrival records therefore center on the district ports and the Canadian border.

• Alaska, U.S., Arriving and Departing Passenger and Crew Manifests, 1906–1963 ($), with a companion Alaska alien-arrivals set; the alien-arrival manifests for Anchorage, Juneau, Skagway, and Tok Junction are also free on FamilySearch.
• Naturalization. Before 1906 any court of record could naturalize, so records are scattered; after 1906 the process was federalized under the U.S. District Court for Alaska. The Alaska State Archives holds and has indexed by name much of the Southeast Alaska naturalization material, while the National Archives at Seattle holds the remaining federal declarations and petitions; both are also available on FamilySearch.

Land Records

As a federal (public-domain) land state, Alaska granted land through the United States rather than through a colony or the state itself, so original title is documented in General Land Office and Bureau of Land Management records. The first land office opened at Sitka in 1885, but very little land passed into private hands early on — the federal case files show only a few dozen cash entries and a hundred-odd homestead patents for the whole territory before 1908.

Where the records are kept.

• Federal (original title): the BLM General Land Office Records site offers a name-searchable index and images of land patents; the BLM Alaska status and survey systems provide master title plats, survey plats, and later conveyances. The National Archives at Seattle holds copies of the tract books, township plats, and land-entry case files.
• Recording districts (later transfers): once land left federal ownership, deeds and mortgages were recorded not by counties but by the district recorder in each recording district, the Alaska analog to a county recorder.

Distinctive Alaska land programs. The Alaska Native Allotment Act of 1906 let individual Alaska Natives claim up to 160 acres on proof of five years’ use and occupancy; it was repealed by ANCSA in 1971, but thousands of pending claims were carried to completion. Federal townsite trustees issued deeds within surveyed towns and Native communities, and under ANCSA the Alaska Native regional and village corporations received roughly forty-five million acres, conveyed through the BLM. Online, the Alaska, U.S., Deed and Tract Books, 1906–1975 ($) and Alaska, U.S., Land Patent Records, 1916–1969 ($) cover the townsite and patent records, and FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed land documents searchable by every name they contain.

Military Records

Alaska’s military record begins with the Russian-American Company’s own forces and continues through the United States Army, Navy, and Revenue Cutter Service that governed and patrolled the district after 1867, but its most distinctive service records come from the Second World War, fought partly on Alaskan soil.

• Early United States service: after 1867 the Army, then the Navy, administered Alaska, garrisoning posts such as Fort Egbert at Eagle and Fort Davis near Nome; officer biographies and post records survive in university and federal collections.
• World War I: a territorial act compiled a register of Alaska residents who served in 1917–1918, including those who died in service; a transcription is at the Alaska State Archives, and draft-registration cards are online.
• World War II and the Aleutian campaign: the fighting on Attu, Kiska, and at Dutch Harbor generated extensive photograph and personal-papers collections in the state’s archives and university libraries.
• Alaska Territorial Guard: the volunteer “Tundra Army” of 1942–1947, drawn overwhelmingly from Alaska Native communities, was later recognized for federal veteran status; its roster and station records are at the Alaska State Archives, and a member list is maintained by the Alaska Office of Veterans Affairs.

Probate Records

Probate — wills, administrations of intestate estates, and guardianships of minors — is among the richest sources for family relationships, and in territorial Alaska it was handled by the district courts through the U.S. Commissioners who doubled as probate judges.

• Territorial era (1884–1959): the Alaska State Archives holds more than seventeen thousand probate case files, together with two name indexes; the files include estates, guardianships, adoptions, and coroner’s inquests, and adoption files remain confidential.
• Since statehood: the Superior Court of the Alaska Court System proves wills, grants administrations, and appoints guardians.

Online, FamilySearch has digitized many of the territorial probate and guardianship files by precinct, and FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed wills and estate papers searchable by every name they contain.

Tax Records

Alaska’s tax landscape differs sharply from the older states. As a thinly settled public-domain territory, it never levied the broad, county-based property taxes that fill eastern courthouses, and much of the state still lies in the Unorganized Borough, which has no areawide property tax; there is likewise no statewide sales or personal income tax today.

• Territorial revenue and treasury records — from the Department of Taxation, the Office of the Territorial Treasurer, and the Department of Audit — survive at the Alaska State Archives and can place a taxpayer in a community and year.
• Where local taxes were assessed, later real and personal property assessment rolls are held by each organized borough’s assessor; communities within the Unorganized Borough generally produced no borough-level property-tax records.