Through the Seiler Fellowship, established in 1999 as a tribute to former Supreme Court of Missouri Judge Robert Eldridge Seiler (1912-1998), the Society has funded stipends to established scholars or qualified doctoral candidates to study any series of court records held by the Missouri State Archives.

Supreme Court of Missouri case files and the other judicial holdings of the Missouri State Archives comprise millions of pages of legal records from the 18th century through the present and their unique nature yields documentation and primary materials found in no other repository.

These records provide a history of broad topics in Missouri’s experience, such as slavery, women’s issues, immigration, the Civil War and the environment.

The Society’s support was instrumental in the Archives’ receipt of a separate $100,000 grant from the National Archives to make Civil War-era records, including the records of the Dred Scott case and others, accessible online.

Through the Seiler program, the Society has also funded two collegiate summer interns to work with the Archives on an indexing project.