The genealogy measure: Fort Wayne's center and this county's room

The comparison, at true size

The measure: Fort Wayne's Allen County Public Library — a two-hour drive southeast and this library's standing comparison — built the largest public-library genealogy collection in the United States: a national collection assembled from 1928 forward, filled in the 1960s by a photocopying scheme that trucked other libraries' genealogy collections to Fort Wayne and copied them book by book, at a take its own centennial history puts between 15,000 and 30,000 volumes, and described in the region's library literature as holding more than 72,000 browsable family histories alone. Its Genealogy Center is a destination researchers travel to. South Bend's collection is a different kind of instrument, and this history states it at its true size: not a national collection, and not measured in any published volume count the sources reached could supply — the library publishes no such figure — but the deepest collection anywhere on its own ground. Its genealogies are the county's own: the obituary index, the directories, the yearbooks, the Tribune's photographs, the records of St. Joseph County's families, kept by the department charged with exactly that ground and no other. Fort Wayne built the bigger room; this is the county's room, and for St. Joseph County questions it is the first and usually the last stop. The two collections cross-check each other across the region's research — the Fort Wayne record in this history was dug in part from Allen County's shelves, and this record in part from South Bend's.

Sources:

1. Dawne Slater-Putt, Beyond Books: Allen County's Public Library History, 1895–1995 (1995), as carried in this history's Fort Wayne Libraries record — the DAR shelf of 1928 and the 1960s copying scheme at 15,000–30,000 volumes (37,000 in Tom Castaldi's 2011 account).
2. Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, Local & Family History materials page — the Allen County Genealogy Center's "more than 72,000 browsable family histories."
3. St. Joseph County Public Library, "Local & Family History" — this department's documented holdings and tools, the basis of the county-depth statement; no volume count is published there or in the library's history.