North Slope Borough AKGenWeb is a free genealogical site about the history of the Alaskan borough. We hope you find helpful clues for your research of ancestors and relatives of the area.
Are you familiar with the area? Do you have a family tree connection to the area? Volunteers are always needed! Please consider contributing your pieces of North Slope family history. Corrections, updates, and additions to this site are always welcome. If you are interested in helping, please contact the Borough Coordinator: Rebecca Maloney.
Borough Coordinator: Rebecca Maloney North Slope Borough AKGenWeb
AKGenWeb State Coordinator: Norma Hass
AKGenWeb Asst State Coordinator: Martha Graham
North Slope Borough, established in 1972 by an election of the indigenous people in the region following Congressional passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. In 1974 a Home Rule Charter was adopted, enabling it to exercise any legitimate governmental power. The borough seat is Barrow. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the borough has a total area of 94,796 square miles, of which 88,695 square miles is land and 6,101 square miles (6.4%) is water. The borough is larger than 39 states.
The North Slope Borough is the largest county-level political subdivision in the United States by area, with a larger land area than that of the state of Utah (UT is the 13th-largest state in the nation). In 2010, the population was 9,430. The borough is the fourth-least densely populated county-level entity in the United States.
Its western coastline is along the Chukchi Sea, while its eastern shores (beyond Point Barrow) are on the Beaufort Sea.
We are the chosen. In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors. To put flesh on their bones and make them live again. To tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve. Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before. We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story. So, we do. In finding them, we somehow find ourselves. How many graves have I stood before now and cried? I have lost count. How many times have I told the ancestors, "You have a wonderful family; you would be proud of us.". How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love there for me? I cannot say. It goes beyond just documenting facts. It goes to who I am, and why I do the things I do. It goes to seeing a cemetery about to be lost forever to weeds and indifference and saying - I can't let this happen. The bones here are bones of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It goes to doing something about it. It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish. How they contributed to what we are today. It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family. It goes to deep pride that the fathers fought and some died to make and keep us a nation. It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us. It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give us birth, without them we could not exist, and so we love each one, as far back as we can reach. That we might be born who we are. That we might remember them. So we do. With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are they and they are the sum of who we are. So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers. That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those who we had never known before."
by Della M. Cummings Wright; Rewritten by her granddaughter Dell Jo Ann McGinnis Johnson; Edited and Reworded by Tom Dunn, 1943."