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by Dawne

In late March of 1913, the Ohio Valley experienced one of the most devastating floods of all time. Especially in river towns like Peru, Logansport and Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Dayton, Ohio, the water was all-consuming. Fort Wayne is home to the Maumee River Basin, one of the eight major watersheds in the state. The confluence of the Maumee, St. Joseph and St. Marys Rivers is in the heart of town, and the Basin also includes the Trier, Junk and Fairfield Ditches and Spy Run Creek.

Locally, the rivers crested at 26.1 feet before the flood waters receded. Some 5,000 acres were flooded in the Fort Wayne area and 15,000 were left homeless for more than a week. The property loss was estimated at $25 million.

The devastation in the Midwest began with deadly tornadoes in Nebraska and Iowa on Easter Sunday, March 23. The storms moved eastward across Illinois and into Indiana. Northern Indiana already had experienced a heavy rainfall on Good Friday, March 21. Between the morning of March 23 and the night of March 25, 4.75 inches of rain fell. As many as 2000 homes were underwater in Fort Wayne by Tuesday, March 25. Before ...

by Dawne

The Genealogy Center received an email query from fellow genealogy librarian Marcia Ford of the Kokomo and Howard County (IN) Public Library Genealogy & Local History Department, recently, asking if we could identify the object in the picture featured with this entry. Marcia had been sent the photo by a colleague, whose friend found the object with a metal detector. It is rectangular, about two inches wide and three inches tall with a hole in the top and small tabs on the sides. Its legend reads “XMAS GREETING ’91” and what looks like “__ESA ARMSTRONG.” Underneath that, “FT. WAYNE, IND.” is clear. There may be a smaller embossed message below this, but it isn’t readable from the picture.

After some research, it seems likely that this metal tag was once attached to a hat box. The name on the tag isn’t “___ESA ARMSTRONG,” but “JAMES A. ARMSTRONG.” According to The Illustrated Milliner, Vol. 11, pp. 175-176, published in 1910, James A. Armstrong established Adams & Armstrong millinery firm in Fort Wayne in 1886 and shortly after bought out his partner and changed the name of the company to The James A. Armstrong Millinery Co. The 1890-1891 Fort ...

We are inviting you to contribute images of the storm of Friday, June 29th, and its aftermath, to the Allen County Public Library's Community Album. There is no limit on how many images you can share. Send your photos via email to Genealogy@ACPL.Info. Include a brief description including the location and indicate if you do not want your name included in the attribution. Be a part of recording this event for future historians!

In 1990, the department expanded again, back out into the original building, providing 160 seat, with two storage closets converted to use for our first CD-ROM stations (doors on far right)...

 

... as well as sixty microtext readers.

Next time: The expansion in the late 1990s.

The old Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County, a Carnegie building at 301 West Wayne Street, opened in 1904, and had overflowed into fourteen separate buildings around the downtown area by the early 1960s.

 

When the Indiana History and Genealogy room opened in 1961, it was a small space in an already crowded building.

 

 Most research material had to be retrieved using call slips, pieces of paper on which to request a volume to examine. Closed stacks and call slips would continue into the next century.

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We were wondering if any of our readers recall coming in to do research back in the early 1960s. Would you share your memories?

By John Indiana birth and death records can sometimes be confusing to use, especially in Lake and Allen counties. When the act creating the State Board of Health was passed in 1881, many individual cities established their own local health departments, which gathered birth and death information in separate books from those of the county. For most counties, these records were gathered together and published in single volumes by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, typically covering the period 1882 to 1920. Most of these are available in a statewide index on Ancestry. In Lake and Allen (and perhaps a few other counties as well), not all of the indexes were combined. Lake County, for example, had a county office, as well as separate offices at Crown Point, East Chicago, Gary, Hammond, Hobart, and Whiting. The WPA published these records in individual volumes, so if you have ancestors in that county, you may wish to search all of the volumes. Allen County is more problematic. In the early twentieth century, separate health departments existed for the county, as well as in Fort Wayne, Monroeville, Grabill, New Haven, Woodburn, and Leo. The WPA volume included only the Fort Wayne and ...

It started on Wednesday, January 25, 1978, with snow, cold and wind. By afternoon, a blizzard warning had been issued for the state, and businesses were closing down. By the next morning, 17 inches of snow had fallen on Fort Wayne, temperatures were in the single digits, and additional snow fall drifted in front of the wind to make visibility poor and driving dangerous. Emergency workers and essential personnel struggled to aid victims and begin the clean up, but for several days, most residents stayed home or visited neighbors, and enjoyed the enforced vacation before emerging to gaze in awe at snowdrifts that might reach the roof. A number of collections of blizzard photographs were scanned for inclusion in the Allen County Public Library’s Community Album, and are available for viewing. If you have a similar collection you are willing to loan, we’d love to include your visual memories as well.

Among the Genealogy Center’s most popular databases is one for local obituaries. This index covers area deaths listed in Fort Wayne newspapers, and is separated into two parts. The first part of the index, covering 1841 to 1899, was originally printed in book form, and, as specific newspaper titles and precise dates are not included, locating a specific item can be challenging. The second part of the index, which provides specific citations, begins with 1900. New citations are added regularly by staff and volunteers to cover recent deaths, and to add material which was missed in earlier versions. Microfilm copies of these newspapers are located in the Genealogy Center’s microtext collection, which can be used onsite, and, for those out-of-area researchers, copies can be obtained by sending an email request to Genealogy@ACPL.Info. Copies are mailed, so mailing addresses should be included in requests. Cost is $2.50 per obituary, billed when the material is sent.

Genealogy Center staff members are always answering the question, “Why genealogy in Fort Wayne?” So we thought a little bit of how our collection came to be in order. But the idea of having the largest genealogy collection in a public library did not spring into someone’s mind as a single idea, and it took a number of steps to build what we know today. Less than a decade after the dedication of the Carnegie Library on West Wayne Street, the Mary Penrose Wayne Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution asked for, and was granted, space on the library’s shelves for copies of the society’s lineage books and other research material. Later, the chapter was encouraged to donate family or biographical histories to the DAR shelves, eventually building to about 400 volumes. Another facet of the Center’s history involves two men, a station wagon and lots of road trips. During the 1930s and 1940s, library director Rex Potterf, and employee Fred Reynolds roamed the highways of the Midwest, visiting used book stores and estate sales, buying used books to stock the library. Among the fiction, general interest and children’s books were many family and county historical sources. But the actual ...