Local History & Genealogy

antique books and magnifying glass

About the Local History & Genealogy Collection

The Local History & Genealogy Collection is housed at the Carnegie Library branch and focuses on documenting the history of Muncie and Delaware County including its peoples, places, and events. Resources include but are not limited to: biographies, birth records, cemetery indexes, city directories, county and local histories, court records, death records, deeds, family files, funeral records, maps, marriage records, newspapers, probate records, school yearbooks, wills, and more. Special collections include: cookbooks, diaries, Indiana literature, manuscripts, photographs, scrapbooks, and other artifacts. The Local History & Genealogy Collection also archives the history of Muncie Public Library. 

Muncie/Delaware County Digital Resource Library

Muncie Public Library

Delaware County Court Documents, Wills, Deeds, Obituary Index, Funeral Home Records, and Beech Grove Cemetery Records. Muncie Public Library has been digitizing and hosting this database of Muncie and Delaware County records since the 1990s.

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Muncie Public Library Digital Archives

Muncie Public Library

Muncie Public Library's searchable digital archives of special collections of yearbooks, photographs, oral histories, and more. New content added regularly.

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Probate Index

Muncie Public Library

Alphabetized list of probate records available at Muncie Public Library.

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Ancestry Library

Ancestry Library

Genealogy database with billions of records from around the world including birth, marriage, death, census, immigration, military, and more. May only be used within the library.

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MyHeritage

MyHeritage

Genealogy records from around the world including birth, marriage, death, military, census, and more.

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Indiana County Histories (Archives Unbound)

Archives Unbound

Indiana county histories and atlases from 1857-1922.

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ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Indiana Collection

ProQuest Historical Newspapers

Search or browse full-page digitized editions of historical Muncie newspapers dating back to 1900 and other Indiana newspapers. Click on “Publications” to view a list of available newspapers.

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Newspapers.com Collection: The Muncie Daily Herald: 1892 - 1906

Newspapers.com
Limited collection of newspaper issues available on the newspapers.com platform. Only available within a Muncie Public Library location. For access to all other Muncie newspapers on microfilm, please visit Carnegie Library.
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Newspapers.com Collection: Indiana State Library

Inspire lifelong learning library for Hoosiers

The Indiana State Library is digitizing its newspaper collection in partnership with Newspapers.com. Indiana residents can get free access to over one million pages by using the link on the INSPIRE homepage.

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Research Guides

These guides provide some guidance and links to resources to help you start your research.

Digital Exhibits

Explore digital exhibits created by Muncie Public Library.

Local History & Genealogy Collection Spotlight

Image for "A Field Guide to American Houses"

A Field Guide to American Houses

Here at last: the fully expanded, updated, and freshly designed second edition of the most comprehensive and widely acclaimed guide to domestic architecture--in print since its publication in 1984, and acknowledged everywhere as the unmatched, essential reference to American houses.

Focusing on dwellings in urban and suburban neighborhoods and rural locations all across the continental United States--houses built over the past three hundred years reflecting every social and economic background--this guide provides in-depth information on the essentials of domestic architecture with facts and frames of reference that will enable you to look in a fresh way at the houses around you. With more than 1,600 detailed photographs and line illustrations, and a lucid, vastly informative text, it will teach you not only to recognize distinct architectural styles but also to understand their historical significance. What does that cornice signify? Or that porch? The shape of that door? The window treatment? When was this house built? What does the style say about its builders and their eras? You'll find the answers to these and myriad other questions in this encyclopedic and eminently practical book.

Here are more than fifty styles and their variants, spanning seven distinct historical periods. Each style is illustrated with a large schematic drawing that highlights its most important identifying features. Additional drawings and photographs provide, at a glance, common alternative shapes, principal subtypes, and close-up views of typical small details--windows, doors, cornices, etc.--that can be difficult to see in full-house illustrations. The accompanying text explains the identifying features of each style, describing where and in what quantity they can be found, discussing all of its notable variants, and tracing their origin and history.

The book's introductory chapters provide invaluable general discussions of construction materials and techniques, house shapes, and the various traditions of architectural fashion that have influenced American house design through the past three centuries. A pictorial key and glossary simplifies identification, connecting easily recognized architectural features--the presence of a tile roof, for example--to the styles in which that feature is likely to be found.

Among the new material included in this edition are chapters on styles that have emerged in the thirty years since the previous edition; a groundbreaking chapter on the development and evolution of American neighborhoods; an appendix on approaches to construction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; an expanded bibliography; and 600 new photographs and line drawings throughout.

Here is an indispensable resource--both easy and pleasurable to use--for the house lover and the curious tourist, for the house buyer and the weekend stroller, for neighborhood preservation groups, architecture buffs, and everyone who wants to know more about their own homes and communities. It is an invaluable book of American architecture, culture, and history.

Image for "Notable American Indians"

Notable American Indians

 

 

Due primarily to a lack of accurate data, little has been written regarding the life histories of individual American Indians.

 

Biographical Indian sketches that have been published are about a few outstanding individuals, mainly leaders in warfare, such as Tecumseh, Weyapiersenwah or Blue Jacket, and Meshekinnoquah or Little Turtle.

 

The authors of this volume have compiled a broad range of biographical data and have woven them into rewarding personal stories about Indian leaders of the lower Midwest (1700-1850) that will engage the reader's attention.

 

In this book, the reader will discover what life was like for thirty-one notable American Indians of the Miami, Potawatomi Shawnee and Delaware tribes.

 

Many of these notables include renowned warriors and patriots of the Indian cause during the 18th and 19th centuries however, several individuals are peace chiefs and religious leaders, women and white captives. For many of these subjects, their lives were interwoven with each other.

 

In the gathering of this book, the authors have pored over letters, diaries, reports, books and internet and have traveled around the Midwest researching historical society archives, libraries and historic sites.

 

Accompanying the biographies are individual pen and ink drawings that add visual interest to the pages.

 

The authors write with a concerned passion about the historic Indian subjects they selected from the history pages of an earlier time.

 

The reader of American Indian history will profoundly benefit from this biographical compilation that is highly readable and informative.