About the Project

The Copper Miners Employment Cards Database was created with a generous grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) awarded in January 2020 to a group of faculty and staff in Michigan Tech’s Department of Social Sciences, the Michigan Tech Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections in the Van Pelt and Opie Library, and the Geospatial Research Facility in the Great Lakes Research Center. The primary purpose of the project was to fund the sustainable preservation and increased access to one of the MTU Archives’ most important and often consulted collections: a group of Calumet & Hecla Mining Company employment cards (MS-002). These double-sided cards contain the employment history and other personal information about almost 40,000 people who came from all over the world to work for the region’s largest mining company.

Major steps in this project included:

• Digitizing each card via high-resolution scans of each side
• Transcribing the content of each card and creating related metadata
• Record-linking each employee record to other historical data sets and historic maps in the Copper Country Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure, a historical GIS project housed in the Geospatial Research Facility

Three years of work resulted in two major publicly accessible online products:

• The Copper Miners Employment Cards database hosted by the Van Pelt and Opie Library
• Integration of the employee records in the CC-HSDI, accessible to the public as the Keweenaw Time Traveler

The grant-funded part of the project ran from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2022. During that time, the grant employed a full-time library staff member, and always had between 5-8 undergraduate students employed working on scanning, transcription, and metadata creation. Over the course of three years, more than 25 Michigan Tech students worked on the project. Hailing from majors across campus that included Social Sciences but also Engineering and Computer Sciences, each student spent meaningful time with historic archival documents learning about Copper Country workers in new and often unexpected ways. These intrepid students adjusted their work schedules and habits to manage the major disruptions caused by COVID-19, which started just 2 months after the grant had been awarded.

Items in CMEC are drawn from the Calumet and Hecla Mining Companies Collection (MS-002) in the holdings of the Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections. The materials in MS-002 were created by Calumet & Hecla (C&H) and its subsidiaries over C&H’s near-century of existence and address the company’s technologies, operations, prospects, buildings, and employees. MS-002 is one of Michigan Tech’s largest archival collections, spanning well over 600 ledgers and boxes of material. You can learn more about the collection from the online finding aid.

The yellow employment records scanned for CMEC constitute one part of the documents that C&H maintained on its workers specifically. The cards were filled out when a person applied for work and then used to keep track of subsequent employment with the company. As a result, these materials provide biographical and professional information about nearly 40,000 people, such as places of origin and residence, ethnic backgrounds, names of family members, occupations, rates of pay, and disciplinary history. The cards’ depth of detail and sometimes frank remarks have, for decades, proven their incredible worth to genealogists, labor historians, and other researchers at the Michigan Tech Archives.

This project was supported by a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.