The Keepers of the Open File

1917 – today

Every mystery in this section has a custodian, and the section closes with them, because the openness of these questions is not neglect — it is, in each case, the present state of an institution's own record. The South Bend News-Times of 19 August 1917 sits digitized in Hoosier State Chronicles, Indiana's digital historic newspaper program, with Mike Muszar still missing in its last paragraph; the issues of the days after, which may hold his answer, wait on microfilm in the St. Joseph County Public Library's keeping, and the coroner's index of the county he vanished in is published and waiting too. Staff Sergeant Burch's file is kept open by the strongest machinery any government aims at an absence: the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency holds his case profile among the nearly 7,500 Korean War names it still works, and closes files like his a few dozen a year, by laboratory evidence and a knock on a family's door. The University of Notre Dame Archives keeps the 1879 fire in its own telling at "uncertain," with the Scholastic's 1879 verdict — "unknown" — in its stacks. The Blue Sox' name is blank in the keeping of the richest archive their league has: The History Museum in South Bend holds the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League's national collection, more than two thousand items, and the state has set the club's marker in bronze — and neither the archive nor the bronze says why Blue Sox. The Miami town's site rests with the oldest custodians of all: the tribal record and the French documents, which name the town, measure from it, and never surveyed it.

The standard this section keeps: a mystery, for the purposes of this history, is not a story that resists telling. It is a place where the record, read honestly and pressed hard, stops — a name in a Sunday headline that no later record picks up; a line in a federal list that has read the same way for seventy years; an origin a university calls uncertain in its own words a century and a half on. The stopping places are printed here at their true size, with the searches made and the routes that remain, so that the reader inherits the questions exactly as the record hands them down: open, documented, and — until a coroner's book, a microfilm reel, a laboratory, or a minute book says otherwise — unanswered.

Sources:

1. Hoosier State Chronicles (newspapers.library.in.gov) — the South Bend News-Times run, including 19 August 1917.
2. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency — the unaccounted-for lists and the August 2025 family briefing count of nearly 7,500 from the Korean War; the agency's stated mission, to account for Americans who went missing while serving their country.
3. University of Notre Dame Archives, "The Great Fire of 1879," and the Scholastic volumes at archives.nd.edu.
4. Indiana University South Bend news release, 26 May 2021 — The History Museum's AAGPBL collection of over 2,000 items, in its executive director's words; the marker dedication.