The Archives, Seat by Seat

as of November 2026

Four seats hold this town's paper past: the county library's local-history department at South Bend, the historical society at Walkerton, the state library at Indianapolis, and the town's and county's own offices — each stated with what it holds for North Liberty, and what it does not claim. The county library's Local & Family History department — third floor of Main Library, South Bend, a FamilySearch affiliate, with its obituary index, its church-record shelves (which hold three of this town's congregations' records, on the genealogical society's crosswalk), its million-photograph newspaper archive, and its digital collections — is dug whole's libraries leg and stands here at pointer size, as the boundary rule requires: it is the system's seat, and the libraries leg owns it. The Walkerton Area Historical Society is this town's archive in practice: it holds the North Liberty News microfilm for 1912–1962, it holds the oral-history base of the Park nomination — the 2005 Heim interviews — and its archives are cited outright in that federal form; a small society in the sister town keeps the town's paper memory, and the build records the arrangement as it finds it. The Indiana State Library holds the print shelf — the county histories in closed stacks with their films as working copies, the Stoll volume in print and on film, the Sanborn microfilm, the DAR volumes — and publishes the guides this section used: the county-history holdings list, the Sanborn holdings list, and the redistricting guide that settled the library district. Its digital arms, the state newspaper programme and Indiana Memory, are treated in the digitized-shelves article. The university archives in South Bend stand as the county system's digital partner — co-digitizer of the local-history collections — at pointer size, their own holdings for this town not separately inventoried. And the unwritten seats print as plainly as the written ones: the town clerk's office and the county recorder, clerk, and commissioners hold the instruments this build's gaps keep naming — the incorporation petition and order of 1894, the recorded plat, the certified election summary of 2026 — in their own books, undigitized, and the pull list below names them there. What no seat claims also prints: the state historic-preservation database (SHAARD) was not directly checked in either pass, and its check stands in the register as the settler for the state survey numbers behind the federal forms, the Commercial form itself carrying its survey numbers on its face.