Dorris Keeven-Franke Email & Phone Number

Dorris Keeven-Franke is an award-winning author, public historian, professional genealogist, and archivist. A lifelong resident of Missouri, she writes about the history of Missouri's earliest residents. Her forthcoming book is the biography of Archer Alexander, a freedom seeker whose burial site is listed on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. Alexander had overheard Confederates plotting to destroy the local railroad bridge, informed the Union troops, and then fled for his life, taking sixteen other freedom seekers with him on the Underground Railroad. He is the National icon for Emancipation, seen as the formerly enslaved man rising beneath President Lincoln on the Emancipation Memorial, erected by the formerly enslaved in Washington, D.C.'s Lincoln Park.A member of the Missouri Speakers Bureau (2025-2026) sponsored by the Missouri Humanities and the State Historical Society of Missouri, her programs include Archer Alexander and the Underground Railroad and The Boone's Lick Road. She has authored numerous books, articles and blogs on Missouri's early history. As Executive Director of Missouri Germans Consortium, her current project is to preserve the story of Missouri's German Heritage and promote cross-cultural stories of German Americans and African Americans. She is President of Missouri's Boone's Lick Road Association. She is President Emeritus of the German American Committee, an umbrella organization of all St. Louis German organizations. As U.S. contact and curator for the International traveling exhibition UTOPIA-Revisiting a German State in America, she promoted the history of German Americans to Missouri in the early 19th Century. She has authored several books and is included in many others, on the history of Missouri, including A Window Through Time, Power of the People, History of Warren County, The German Heritage of Missouri (Tolzmann), and Utopia - Revisiting a German State in America (Falkenberg). She is a professional genealogist who taught Genealogy for the City of St. Charles Adult and Continuing Education. She is the Lead archivist for Bellefontaine Cemetery and Arboretum. Formerly the archivist for the St. Charles County Historical Society, and the Washington (MO) Historical Society, she has also worked as project director for several Missouri Local Records projects. She was awarded the German-American Friendship Award from the Federal Republic of Germany in 2016.

Listed skills include History, Public Speaking, Museums, Research, and 46 others.