Local & Family History: the county's memory, kept on the third floor

The department, its collections, and its published work

The department: Local & Family History — LFH — is the department this history, like every researcher in the county, works through. It sits on the third floor of the Main Library, where its research librarians take questions in person and by mail from long-distance and homebound patrons, and it maintains the tools the county's memory runs on: the St. Joseph County Obituary Index, the city directories and high-school yearbooks it actively collects, the published family histories of locally connected families, and archival collections held in closed stacks and described in finding aids on the library's digital portal, Michiana Memory. The library is a FamilySearch affiliate library, and the department runs public digitization stations where residents convert photographs, slides, film, tapes and records. Its largest single acquisition came by gift: when the South Bend Tribune was sold in 2019 and its new home had no room for the archive, the newspaper gave its photograph collection to the department — as many as one million photographs taken by Tribune photographers, the library's release says, with the collection's own finding aid measuring the surviving archive at twenty-one cabinets and ninety-four boxes, dated 1937–1999 with the bulk from 1950–1999.

With a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services administered by the Indiana State Library, LFH librarians digitized more than 10,000 of the negatives, and the selection went public on Michiana Memory on 2 September 2021. The department's published work includes the library's own institutional history — Mary Waterson's The Library at the Bend in the River (1994), on which the library's public timeline rests — and staff research in the Tribune's local-history columns, among it the tracing of the county's "vanishing man" tale to Ambrose Bierce's fiction, told in full in the Unsolved Mysteries record. Since 2022 the department has also kept a Storytelling Librarian, gathering residents' own accounts into its Share Your Story community archive — in the autumn of 2026, collecting West Side memories ahead of the new Western Branch.

Sources:

1. St. Joseph County Public Library, "Local & Family History" (sjcpl.org/lfh, November 2026) — the department's place, services, Obituary Index, digitization stations, FamilySearch affiliation, and the Storytelling Librarian and Share Your Story archive.
2. St. Joseph County Public Library, "Library Releases Online Local Photo Archive" (2 September 2021) — the Tribune gift of as many as one million photographs, the 2019 sale, the IMLS grant, and the 10,000 digitized images; Ellen Anderson, Local & Family History Librarian, quoted.
3. South Bend Tribune Photographs Collection finding aid (Indiana Memory) — the archive's dates 1937–1999, bulk 1950–1999; twenty-one cabinets, ninety-four boxes.
4. St. Joseph County Public Library, "History of the St. Joseph County Public Library" — Waterson's history named among its sources; "Share Your Memories of the West Side" (October 2026) — the Storytelling Librarian's West Side collection.