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 "The German-Americans"

The German-Americans

From “We present this essay, a translation from the German, as an example of one ethnic group’s experience in the United States. At a time, when ethnic or nationalist conflicts have caused some countries to disintegrate, ethnicity has become associated with nationalist passions, fundamentalist ideology and religious fervor. Actually, the term ‘ethnicity’ refers to group identification, to things held in common, such as language, cultural values, and history. It is about our lives as part of deeply-felt traditions, about cultural identity, belonging and understanding, based on these commonalities. After a half century of dormancy, the interest in roots re-awakened; in the United States during the 1960s, ethnicity has become respectable. In the political arena this resulted in demands for, and acceptance of, civil rights, the eschewing of once popular ethnic jokes and slurs, and an affirmative approach to cultivating the status of minorities. In family circles it generated a vigorous pursuit of genealogy and heritage which today is fostered by ready access to records. These include microfilms of federal manuscript censuses, the Latter-day Saints’ Library in Salt Lake City which opened its vast records to the public, and organizations and commercial services that have arisen in many countries to assist the researcher. And it has led to affirming the United States as a multicultural nation, not a melting pot, but a patchwork quilt, in which the various elements are a source of strength and pride. The motto of the United States, e pluribus Unum (One out of many), reminds us that each generation is called upon to work toward ethnic and racial harmony and to overcome tensions and violence born out of indifference, misunderstanding and distrust. Professor Adams’ essay wants to be such a reminder.”--LaVern J. Rippley, Eberhard Reichmann

Image for "What Middletown Read"

What Middletown Read

The discovery of a large cache of circulation records from the Muncie, Indiana, Public Library in 2003 offers unprecedented detail about American reading behavior at the turn of the twentieth century. Frank Felsenstein and James J. Connolly have mined these records to produce an in-depth account of print culture in Muncie, the city featured in the famed "Middletown" studies conducted by Robert and Helen Lynd almost a century ago. Using the data assembled and made public through the What Middletown Read Database (www.bsu.edu/libraries/wmr), a celebrated new resource the authors helped launch, Felsenstein and Connolly analyze the borrowing choices and reading culture of social groups and individuals.

What Middletown Read is much more than a statistical study. Felsenstein and Connolly dig into diaries, meeting minutes, newspaper reports, and local histories to trace the library's development in relation to the city's cosmopolitan aspirations, to profile individual readers, and to explore such topics as the relationship between children's reading and their schooling and what books were discussed by local women's clubs. The authors situate borrowing patterns and reading behavior within the contexts of a rapidly growing, culturally ambitious small city, an evolving public library, an expanding market for print, and the broad social changes that accompanied industrialization in the United States. The result is a rich, revealing portrait of the place of reading in an emblematic American community.

Book cover for Andrew Carnegie, cream cover with a picture of Andrew Carnegie in black suit and top hat walking.

Andrew Carnegie

Majestically told and based on materials not available to any previous biographer, the definitive life of Andrew Carnegie-one of American business's most iconic and elusive titans-by the bestselling author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. Celebrated historian David Nasaw, whom The New York Times Book Reviewhas called "a meticulous researcher and a cool analyst," brings new life to the story of one of America's most famous and successful businessmen and philanthropists- in what will prove to be the biography of the season. Born of modest origins in Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie is best known as the founder of Carnegie Steel. His rags to riches story has never been told as dramatically and vividly as in Nasaw's new biography. Carnegie, the son of an impoverished linen weaver, moved to Pittsburgh at the age of thirteen. The embodiment of the American dream, he pulled himself up from bobbin boy in a cotton factory to become the richest man in the world. He spent the rest of his life giving away the fortune he had accumulated and crusading for international peace. For all that he accomplished and came to represent to the American public-a wildly successful businessman and capitalist, a self-educated writer, peace activist, philanthropist, man of letters, lover of culture, and unabashed enthusiast for American democracy and capitalism-Carnegie has remained, to this day, an enigma. Nasaw explains how Carnegie made his early fortune and what prompted him to give it all away, how he was drawn into the campaign first against American involvement in the Spanish-American War and then for international peace, and how he used his friendships with presidents and prime ministers to try to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. With a trove of new material-unpublished chapters of Carnegie's Autobiography; personal letters between Carnegie and his future wife, Louise, and other family members; his prenuptial agreement; diaries of family and close friends; his applications for citizenship; his extensive correspondence with Henry Clay Frick; and dozens of private letters to and from presidents Grant, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and British prime ministers Gladstone and Balfour, as well as friends Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and Mark Twain-Nasaw brilliantly plumbs the core of this facinating and complex man, deftly placing his life in cultural and political context as only a master storyteller can.