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Indiana State Library, St. Joseph County research and holdings guides; Indiana Archives and Records Administration, land records
Indianapolis holds the control copies and the land record. The State Library's county guides are this build's best single "where things are" carrier after the local-history room: the county-history and maps holdings (the shelf and atlases above), the newspaper holdings lists, and the genealogy guide's run of county records on microfilm — deed indexes 1831–1899, marriage and probate records, the WPA birth and death indexes 1882–1920, abstracts of deeds, wills and marriages. The State Archives holds the federal land-office records for Indiana, and for this township the operative layer is digitized: the La Porte–Winamac land office (opened at La Porte 1833, moved to Winamac 1839, closed 1855) embraced St. Joseph County, and its tract-book database — 48,562 entries with purchaser, residence, purchase date and full legal description — is searchable in the Indiana Digital Archives. That database, not the patent index, is the settler for the first federal entries on the townsite sections; its stated limit prints with it: some half-million acres of the district had already been sold earlier through the Crawfordsville and Fort Wayne offices and are not in it.