Local & Family History, St. Joseph County Public Library

304 S. Main Street — the county's working archive, and this history's home shelf

The department: the Local & Family History department of the St. Joseph County Public Library is where a checker of this history will spend the most hours. Its own published history of the library rests on Mary Waterson's The Library at the Bend in the River (St. Joseph County Public Library, 1994) — catalogued under Mary Waterson; the library's own timeline credits the work to "Edith C. M. [Mary] Waterson," and the name is printed both ways here because the record prints it both ways. Waterson is not digitized anywhere this build reached, and the Libraries file names it as the book in which the Castle's architect almost certainly stands: the department's own shelf is the route.

The Tribune photographs: the department's largest single holding is the South Bend Tribune Photographs Collection — the newspaper's negative archive, 1937–1999 (bulk 1950–1999), 21 cabinets and 94 boxes, donated on 20 May 2019 when the sold paper could no longer house it, and processed under Local & Family History librarian Ellen Anderson (finding aid May 2020, updated August 2024). The library's release of 2 September 2021 put more than 10,000 digitized negatives online at Michiana Memory, from a gift the library describes as "as many as 1 million photographs," digitized under an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant administered by the Indiana State Library. The finding aid is itself a document: it records that the collection suffered theft and misplacement by newspaper employees over the years, and that a portion of it passed temporarily to the History Museum around 1992 — a checker puzzled by a missing negative is reading a known condition of the collection, not a personal failure. The paper run beside it is catalogued as related material: South Bend Tribune, 1872–2020, on microfilm.

The coroner's index: the department's most consequential holding for this history is one no leg has yet mined: the St. Joseph County Coroner's Records Index, 1879–1960, published by the South Bend Area Genealogical Society. Around those anchors stand the department's Michiana Memory digital collections (among them the 1875 atlas page by page, Crocker's 1873 Review, the Community Chest letterhead, the library-history photographs, and collections for business and industry, civil rights and African American history, high school yearbooks, historic newspapers, postcards, and St. Joseph County maps and atlases), its vertical file, and its staff — the Lerch research credited in the Unsolved file came from this department's own work, John Palmer's among it.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune Photographs Collection finding aid (St. Joseph County Public Library, Local & Family History Services; prepared by Ellen Anderson, May 2020, updated August 2024) — dates, extent, the 2019 gift, the theft and 1992 notes, the microfilm related collection.
2. St. Joseph County Public Library, news release, 2 September 2021 — the 10,000-image release, the "as many as 1 million photographs" gift, the IMLS grant.
3. SJCPL, "History of the St. Joseph County Public Library" — the Waterson citation; catalog records for The Library at the Bend in the River (Mary Waterson, 1994).
4. Indiana Memory, collections by county — the Michiana Memory collection list.