The keepers of the open file

THE HOLDERS, NAMED

The surest evidence that these questions are real is that they sit, every one of them, in somebody's keeping. The Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library is this city's first keeper: it holds the county's newspaper archive — the Enterprise on film from 1858 to the last reel of 2019, the town's smaller papers in their fragments — and its local-history holdings are where the Brunner manuscript's custody and the 1872 Enterprise's account of the fire properly wait to be asked after. The city's commissioned history, Peter De Kever's Mishawaka: A History, is the working file the keepers themselves produced, and half the entries above end at the edge of what it knows. The two men of the wars rest with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, whose state lists this section read and whose case files are the only instruments that can close them. The Dragoon Trace's line waits in the federal surveyors' field notes, held through the Bureau of Land Management's land records and the Indiana Archives. The fire's cause waits, if anywhere, in the press record the Indiana State Library's Hoosier State Chronicles program digitizes — the program through which this section reached the 1872 dispatch — and on the library film in Mishawaka. The village waits behind the state's restricted archaeological database, in the keeping of the Department of Natural Resources' preservation office, and the name readings wait with the History Museum's and the linguists' files. At county frame, the St. Joseph County Public Library and the History Museum in South Bend hold the valley's papers whole.

The rest of this history's open file stands in its own sections, and this closing entry indexes the ones that are mysteries by nature rather than routine gaps awaiting a named pull. The Aliens & UAP section carries a document the Air Force's index cites and no archive can produce: the report behind the one line "Mishawaka, Indiana — INSUFFICIENT DATA" of 8 May 1952, for which no case folder exists under the city's name in either digitization searched. The Veterans section carries a date that no record reached supplies, the charter date of VFW Post 360. The Museums and Arts sections carry a painting whose present resting place is unknown, the Heying mural. Each stands in its section at its documented size, with its settling source named there. This section is therefore not a cabinet of curiosities. It is the index of the work the record itself has left on the table — a village without a chief, a road without a survey, a fire without a cause, two men without graves the government can point to, a grave without a woman, a face without an original, a mark without an author, four newspapers without a surviving issue, a history without a stated home, and a nickname without a document. Each is stated here exactly as far as the documents go, and no farther. When one of them moves — when a field note, a file wrapper, a film reel, or an agency list closes a question — the entry will print its solution the way a solved question deserves, because a solved mystery is a complete entry.

Sources:

1. The sources of the entries above, each of which names its own keeper and its own open end in its own words.
2. UFO Sightings, Veterans, and the Museums section of this history — the 1952 file that is not there, the un found charter date, and the mural's unknown resting place, each at its documented size in its own section.