Researching Lakeville at Main — LFH and Michiana Memory

Local & Family History, 304 S. Main St, South Bend

The deep collection for Lakeville's history is not in Lakeville; it is the Local & Family History department on Main Library's third floor in South Bend. Its own page states the strands that bear on this town: the St. Joseph County Obituary Index; lookups of county obituaries, marriage licenses, and newspaper articles for distant and homebound patrons (a fee may apply); four reservable digitization stations; closed-stack archival collections reached through its finding aids; a FamilySearch affiliate designation; and a donations list that names the very classes this build hunts — local high school yearbooks, city directories, histories of local businesses, organizations, and churches. Contact as the department prints it: (574) 282-4621, local.history@sjcpl.org. What the page does not state is a Lakeville-specific holdings list — the county histories shelved for Union Township, the system's newspaper microfilm runs, a LaVille yearbook run — and that list banks as a named gap on the finding aids and a catalog run under the town's name. The department's largest Lakeville-bearing holding arrived in 2019: the South Bend Tribune Photograph Collection, donated 20 May 2019, from which Local & Family History curated Michiana Memory — over 10,000 digitized negatives, released 2 September 2021, funded by a federal Library Services and Technology Act grant through the State Library; the department will also scan a non-digitized Tribune negative at high resolution for $10 under its current policies. The collection's stated ranges print whole and unmerged, as this build's register carries them: the digitized set is described as negatives of 1937–1990; the collection's own finding aid dates the whole at 1937–1999, bulk 1950–1999, delivered in 23 filing cabinets and 67 boxes (its summary counts 21 cabinets, 94 boxes); the donor's gift is "as many as 1 million photographs" on the system's release, the photographs representing county places and people "from the 1950s to the 1990s." And the rights line prints with the collection wherever it is used, in the words stated at the location: "The Tribune maintains the copyright to all images and clippings contained in the collection, which have been reproduced for personal and educational purposes."