The county register that does not survive

1852 – 1865

The test, run against the surviving-register record: the 1852 registration act made every Indiana county clerk the keeper of a register of the county's Black residents — the "Negro register" — and the question for this county is whether its volume survives. Coy D. Robbins's Indiana Negro Registers, 1852–1865 (1994), the standard census of the surviving volumes, locates fifteen extant registers statewide: Bartholomew, Floyd, Franklin, Gibson, Harrison, Hendricks, Jackson, Jennings, Jefferson, Knox, Martin, Ohio, Orange, Switzerland and Washington counties. St. Joseph County is not among them. The University of Notre Dame Archives' finding aid for its Saint Joseph County (Ind.) records likewise lists no such volume. On the record reached, this county's register does not survive; whether one was ever opened here cannot be told from what survives, and that limit is printed with the fact.

The loss is the common Indiana case, not a local anomaly: Emma Lou Thornbrough's work establishes how sparse registration was even where registers survive — in Clark County, 74 of 582 Black residents registered across eleven years; in Marion County, 25; in Randolph County, 12. The registers were kept unevenly, complied with unevenly, and preserved rarely. St. Joseph County's absence from the surviving list therefore proves non-survival, not non-existence, and it proves nothing at all about compliance in this county — which is exactly why the register is printed here as a tested fact about the archive rather than as a claim about the community. The community itself is counted in the next article, from the record that does survive: the federal census.

Sources

1. Coy D. Robbins, Indiana Negro Registers, 1852–1865 (1994) — the fifteen extant registers, by county; St. Joseph County not among them.
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, finding aid, Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Records (SJO) — no register volume listed.
3. Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana Before 1900 — registration sparsity: Clark County 74 of 582 over eleven years; Marion 25; Randolph 12.