Volunteers Dedicated to Free Genealogy

Grand Forks County North Dakota
Genealogy and History

This Site is Available for Adoption

Our goal is to help you track your ancestors through time by transcribing genealogical and historical data for the free use of all researchers.

We're looking for folks who share our dedication to putting data online and are interested in helping this project be as successful as it can be. If you are interested in joining Genealogy Trails, view our Volunteer Page for further information and then contact Kim.
(Enough knowledge to make a basic webpage and a desire to transcribe data is required)

Until we get a dedicated volunteer to maintain this site, we'll do the best we can to add data as we come across it. You can send your family's raw data (birth/marriage/death, cemetery, census, biography records) to us and we'll include it on this site.

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Grand Forks is the third-largest city in the U.S. state of North Dakota and the county seat of Grand Forks County
Located on the western banks of the Red River of the North in an extremely flat region known as the Red River Valley, the city is prone to flooding and was struck by the devastating Red River Flood of 1997. Originally called Les Grandes Fourches by French fur traders, Grand Forks was founded in 1870 by steamboat captain Alexander Griggs and incorporated on February 22, 1881.
Its location at the fork of the Red River and the Red Lake River gives the city its name.

Prior to settlement by Europeans or Americans, the area where the city now sits — at the forks of the Red River and Red Lake River — had been an important meeting and trading point for Native Americans. Early French explorers, fur trappers, and traders called the area Les Grandes Fourches meaning "The Grand Forks". By the 1740s, Les Grandes Fourches was an important trading post for French fur trappers. A U.S. post office was established on the site on June 15, 1870 and the name was changed to "Grand Forks." Alexander Griggs, a steamboat captain, is regarded as being "The Father of Grand Forks." Griggs' steamboat froze in the Red River on a voyage in late 1870, forcing the captain and his crew to spend the winter camping at Grand Forks. Griggs platted the community in 1875 and Grand Forks was officially incorporated on February 22, 1881. The city quickly grew after the arrival of the Great Northern Railway in 1880 and the Northern Pacific Railway in 1887. In 1883, the University of North Dakota was established, six years before North Dakota was formally recognized as an independent state born from the Dakota Territory.

[Source: wikipedia.org]