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1928–1960
Beginnings: Genealogy at the library began with the Daughters of the American Revolution: a DAR shelf collection seeded by Sue Vesta Hanna's 1928 bequest of twenty-three books, growing to some 400 volumes, among them Griswold's Pictorial History of Fort Wayne. What turned shelving into a collection was the used-book campaign of Rex Potterf and Fred Reynolds — fifteen years of buying trips across the Midwest in the 1940s and 1950s that swept up county histories at a dollar or two a volume. As late as 1956 Potterf still declined to commit the library to genealogy on a large scale, a hesitation the library's 63rd Annual Report preserves. The commitment, when it came, was Reynolds's, urged on him by DAR member Cleo Goff Wilkens.
Sources:
- Slater-Putt, Beyond Books (1995), ch. 3 — the Hanna bequest, the DAR collection, the buying trips and Potterf's 1956 refusal.