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1951–1957 — the county's early aerial photography
Anonymous by survival: The aerial photograph is the one branch of this trade whose South Bend practitioners the record does not name at all. The St. Joseph County Public Library's Local & Family History department keeps the county's early aerial photography as a map collection — its telling as maps is in the Maps file — in two series: a 1951 series, for which no index key survives, its prints marked with township and range lines and stored in the workroom, viewable by appointment; and a 1957 series, for which a key survives. The federal agricultural flights that photographed Indiana counties from the late 1930s onward are the series' known ancestors, but the county's earliest flight years were not established in the records reached, and no firm, pilot, or photographer is named for either series in the library's finding aid or the county's pages. The entry therefore stands as a documented gap with a documented archive on one side of it: the pictures exist, dated and kept; the people who made them do not appear. The county GIS's historic-imagery holdings are the named next pull for whoever would close it.
Sources:
- St. Joseph County Public Library, map case finding aid (20 December 2021) — St. Joseph County Aerial Photographs: the 1951 series (no key; township and range lines marked; workroom, by appointment) and the 1957 series (key available).
- Cross-reference: Historic Maps — the aerial series in the map record, the federal agricultural flights as the series' known ancestors, the county's earliest flight years unestablished, and the county GIS historic-imagery layer as the update pull.