California Genealogical Society blog: CGS Library Collections: Indiana

One in a series by CGS member Chris Pattillo, highlighting some of our holdings at the Library in Oakland. For a fuller listing of our books, journals, and more, consult the CGS Library catalog. Our catalog is also included in WorldCat.

Fall/Winter 2013 Connections

Our Indiana section of the library occupies seven shelves and includes four sets of journals, published between 1961–2015. Four shelves are devoted to county books. One of the most recent journals we have is Connections: The Hoosier Genealogists. The Fall/Winter 2013 edition features an article entitled How Hoosiers Got Hitched: The Genealogist’s Guide to Indiana Marriage Records. This edition also has an article about Pioneering Women Doctors.

The first book I chose to peruse was Indiana Election Returns 1816-1851, published by the Indiana Historical Bureau. It includes results for the Presidential, Congressional, Lieutenant Governor, and General Assembly elections as well as constitutional referendums. For each contest, it lists the names that appeared on the ballot and how many votes each person received. This is a huge amount of data …. and to think they compiled it before we had Excel.

We have a five-volume set, Indiana and Indianans: A History of Aboriginal and Territorial Indiana and the Century of Statehood by Jacob Piatt Dunn, published in 1919. These books are bound in forest green textured leather with embossed elements and green marbled page edges. They include many photographs of individuals, buildings and maps.

Indiana and Indianans

There are seven Indiana Source Books, based on records collated by The Hoosier Genealogist. These source books include a dense treasure trove of county and family records.

Volney Willson of Muncie and his wife

One of the county books that impressed me was Portrait and Biographical Record of Delaware and Randolph Counties. Its sheer mass is notable, weighing in at eleven pounds. The book was published in 1894 and includes biographical sketches of "Prominent and Representative Citizens," governors of Indiana, and presidents of the United States. Like many of our other books, this one includes high-quality photographs. The preface introduces the book by describing the “elegance of the binding of the volume, and to the beauty of its typography, to the superiority of the paper on which the work is printed, to the truthfulness depicted by its portraits, and to the high class of art in which the latter is finished.” So, I guess I am not the only one to be impressed by the book.

There is lots more to find in our library for Indiana – stop by and check it out.