Indiana Genealogy

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Indiana Genealogy Research Guide

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Indiana Genealogy Research Guide

Quick Facts

Indiana grew out of the Old Northwest, the region the young United States organized under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. French traders and missionaries had gathered at Vincennes on the Wabash generations earlier, and George Rogers Clark took the post for Virginia during the Revolution; from that frontier the Indiana Territory was carved in 1800 and the state admitted in 1816. Because the federal government surveyed and sold nearly all of its land, and because its counties have kept the deeds, wills, marriages, and later vital records ever since, most Indiana research is county research — the trick is knowing which county held jurisdiction in a given year.

• Capital: Indianapolis, the seat of government since 1825. The territorial capital was Vincennes, and Corydon served as the first state capital from 1813 to 1825.
• Statehood: December 11, 1816, the nineteenth state, formed from the Indiana Territory after a constitutional convention met at Corydon earlier that year.
• Counties: 92. Knox County, organized at Vincennes in 1790 under the Northwest Territory, is the oldest; Newton County, re-created from Jasper County in 1859, is the last established. Many northern counties were formed in the 1830s and 1840s as Native American cessions opened.
• Land type: Indiana is a federal (public-domain) state, not a state-land state. The United States held original title and disposed of the land through the General Land Office before settlement, so the first transfer of most parcels is a federal land patent, and only later transfers between individuals are county deeds. The chief exceptions are the French donation lands at Vincennes and Clark’s Grant near the Falls of the Ohio, both older than the federal system.
• Nickname and motto: the Hoosier State; the state motto is “The Crossroads of America.”
• Where records live: most genealogical records — deeds, probate, marriages, and, from the 1880s, births and deaths — are kept at the county level by the clerk, recorder, health department, and auditor, with many older series transferred to the state archives.

Libraries and Archives

Indiana’s statewide collections cluster in Indianapolis, which holds state-government and society records, and in Fort Wayne, home to one of the largest genealogy libraries in the country; county courthouses, public libraries, and local historical societies hold material for their own areas. The principal Indiana repositories include:

• Indiana Archives and Records Administration (the Indiana State Archives) — state-government records: federal land-office tract books and entry papers transferred to the state, court and probate order books for many counties, military service abstracts, tax rolls, and institutional records, with online index databases.
• Indiana State Library and its Genealogy Division — one of the strongest genealogy collections in the region: local histories, published genealogies, manuscripts, city directories, censuses, and statewide marriage and death indexes.
• Indiana Historical Society and its William Henry Smith Memorial Library — manuscripts, family and business papers, church records, photographs, and the society’s genealogical journal, The Hoosier Genealogist.
• Indiana Genealogical Society — the statewide society, with county record databases and indexes contributed by members across the state.
• The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library (Fort Wayne) — among the largest genealogical collections in the United States, with an enormous run of printed family and county histories, periodicals, and microform, and its own free online databases.
• National Archives at Chicago — federal records for Indiana, including General Land Office volumes, federal court and naturalization records, and land-entry case files.
• Friends Collection and College Archives at Earlham College (Richmond) — one of the world’s foremost Quaker collections, holding Indiana, Western, and Northern Yearly Meeting records and extensive Quaker genealogical material.
• The FamilySearch Library and its worldwide FamilySearch Centers hold extensive Indiana microfilm and digital collections, and county courthouses (the Clerk of the Circuit Court and the Recorder), county historians, and local historical societies hold records for their own areas.

Major Websites

These sites host digitized Indiana records and indexes. Subscription sites are marked ($).

• FamilySearch — free; the backbone finding aid, with the FamilySearch Wiki, catalog, and large digitized collections of Indiana vital, land, probate, court, and church records.
• Ancestry ($) — extensive Indiana vital, census, probate, church, naturalization, and tax collections.
• MyHeritage ($) — Indiana marriages, censuses, and other record collections.
• Findmypast ($) — Indiana vital and other collections shared in partnership with FamilySearch.
• Indiana Archives and Records Administration Digital Indexes — free; searchable indexes to land, court, military, naturalization, and institutional records drawn from the State Archives.
• Hoosier State Chronicles — free; the Indiana State Library’s program of digitized historic Indiana newspapers.
• Chronicling America — free; the Library of Congress newspaper archive, including many Indiana titles.
• Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records — free; original federal land patents, survey plats, and field notes for the public-domain land of Indiana.
• Find a Grave and BillionGraves — free; cemetery listings, photographs, and transcriptions.
• Internet Archive and HathiTrust — free; digitized Indiana county and family histories, published record abstracts, and law books.

Law and Government

Indiana’s laws and legislative records explain the jurisdictions and record-keeping practices that produced genealogical records, and many foundational texts have been digitized and are free to read.

• The Laws of Indiana Territory, 1801–1809 and The Laws of Indiana Territory, 1809–1816 — the territorial statutes that governed the region before statehood, digitized on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust.
• The Revised Laws of Indiana of the 1820s and 1830s and the Revised Statutes of 1843, 1852, and 1881, together with the annual session laws, are digitized on the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Google Books.
• The Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Indiana (eight volumes), while a military source, also reprints official wartime documents and legislative material; free on HathiTrust and the Internet Archive.
• The Indiana Archives and Records Administration holds the legislative records of the territory and state, and the early House and Senate journals and the Brevier Legislative Reports (verbatim reports of the General Assembly) are digitized on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust.
• County and municipal governments were created and redrawn by these statutes, so the session laws are the authority for county creation and boundary dates that determine where a family’s records were kept.

Vital Records (Birth, Marriage, Death)

Marriages are the oldest civil vital record, kept by the county clerk from the formation of each county, with the earliest reaching back to the 1810s under a marriage law inherited from the Northwest Territory. Births and deaths were first recorded at the county health office beginning in 1882; statewide death registration began in January 1900, and statewide birth registration in October 1907, with fuller compliance after 1920. A handful of cities recorded births earlier — Fort Wayne from 1870, Indianapolis from 1872, Logansport from 1874, and Kokomo from 1875. No Indiana city keeps its vital records apart from the rest of the state.

Access. Marriage records are public and are requested from the Clerk of the Circuit Court in the county of the marriage. Recent birth records are restricted for a period of years, and certified copies are ordered from the county health department or the Indiana Department of Health, where a fee applies; non-certified genealogical copies are available for older events. State-held death records begin in 1900, so earlier deaths must be sought at the county. Use these online indexes to identify a record, then order from the county or state:

• Marriages: Indiana Marriages, 1811–2019 — free on FamilySearch; also indexed as Indiana Marriages, 1810–2001 ($) and the earlier Indiana Marriage Index, 1800–1941 ($) on Ancestry, and Indiana, Marriages, 1811–1959 ($) on MyHeritage. The Indiana State Library also maintains a statewide marriage index for the years through 1850 and from 1958 onward.
• Births: Indiana, Births and Christenings, 1773–1933 — a free FamilySearch index; and Indiana Birth Certificates, 1907–1944 ($) on Ancestry, an index and images of the state birth certificates.
• Deaths: Indiana, Deaths and Burials, 1750–1993 — a free FamilySearch index; and Indiana Death Certificates, 1899–2017 ($) on Ancestry, an index and images of the state death certificates from 1900 onward, with an accompanying free FamilySearch death index for 1882–1920.

History and Timeline of Major Events

Key dates that shaped Indiana’s jurisdictions and records:

• 1732 — the French establish a permanent post at Vincennes on the Wabash, the oldest European settlement in Indiana.
• 1763 — France cedes the region to Britain at the close of the French and Indian War.
• 1779 — George Rogers Clark captures Vincennes for Virginia during the Revolution.
• 1783 — the Treaty of Paris confirms United States title to the country north of the Ohio.
• 1787 — the Northwest Ordinance organizes the Northwest Territory.
• 1790 — Knox County is created, with its seat at Vincennes.
• 1794–1795 — the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the Treaty of Greenville extinguish Native title to southeastern lands and open “the Gore.”
• 1800 — the Indiana Territory is organized, with Vincennes as capital and William Henry Harrison as governor.
• 1811 — the Battle of Tippecanoe is fought near Prophetstown.
• 1813 — the territorial capital moves from Vincennes to Corydon.
• December 11, 1816 — Indiana is admitted as the nineteenth state, with Corydon its first capital.
• 1818 — the Treaty of St. Mary’s, the “New Purchase,” cedes much of central Indiana and opens dozens of new counties.
• 1825 — the state capital moves to the newly platted city of Indianapolis.
• 1832 — construction begins on the Wabash & Erie Canal, drawing settlers and canal laborers; railroads follow within two decades.
• 1838 — the Potawatomi Trail of Death removes families from the Twin Lakes area near Plymouth to Kansas.
• 1846 — a major forced removal of the Miami from the Wabash follows.
• 1861–1865 — Indiana is a leading source of Union troops in the Civil War.
• Over the years, a number of county courthouses were lost to fire, destroying some local records; the loss varies by county, and duplicate copies were often filed with the state or survived in neighboring counties.

Census Records and Substitutes

Federal censuses survive for Indiana beginning with 1820, the first taken after statehood, and continue every ten years through 1950 (the Daviess County schedule for 1820 is missing). The 1810 census taken for the Indiana Territory has been lost, and, as everywhere, most of the 1890 federal census was destroyed. The federal schedules are free on FamilySearch and on the National Archives 1950 census site, and are also searchable on Ancestry ($) and MyHeritage ($).

Indiana did not take regular statewide state censuses, so there is no decennial state series to fall back on between the federal years. A small number of early enumerations do survive and are worth knowing:

• 1807 Indiana Territory census: a surviving enumeration of free adult males for Knox, Dearborn, and Randolph counties, published as a territorial census substitute.
• Federal non-population schedules: the mortality schedules (1850, 1860, 1870, 1880), agriculture and manufacturing schedules, and the 1890 special schedule of Union veterans and widows all name Indiana residents and help fill gaps.
• Early tax and militia enumerations: lists of taxable men and of males of militia age were taken for apportionment in the territorial and early statehood years and can stand in for a missing census.

Substitutes. Where censuses are missing, city directories (available for the larger Indiana cities from the mid-1800s), tax lists, church and cemetery records, and published county histories are the best tools for placing a family in a given year.

Church Records

Because civil registration of births and deaths is late, church records are the most important substitute for vital records before the 1880s. The largest early groups were Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and the Society of Friends (Quakers), joined by a strong Roman Catholic presence around Vincennes and the Ohio River, German Lutheran and Reformed congregations, and the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), which grew from Indiana roots. Indiana held one of the largest Quaker populations in the nation, drawn by migration out of the Carolinas into the Whitewater Valley.

• Quaker: the essential printed source is Willard Heiss’s Abstracts of the Records of the Society of Friends in Indiana (the Indiana volume of William Wade Hinshaw’s Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy), free on the FamilySearch Digital Library; the original meeting records are at the Friends Collection at Earlham College. Online, Indiana Selected Quaker Meeting Directories, 1836–1921 ($), drawn from Earlham’s holdings, indexes meeting members.
• Methodist: Indiana United Methodist Church Records, 1837–1970 ($) gathers baptisms, marriages, burials, and membership lists; the originals are kept by the United Methodist archives at DePauw University.
• Roman Catholic: the Vincennes parish registers begin in the eighteenth century, and the Diocese of Vincennes originally covered the whole state before it was subdivided; digitized parish registers can be found through the FamilySearch Catalog by parish, and diocesan archives hold the later records.
• Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, and Disciples records are held by denominational archives and area colleges, and thousands of individual congregational registers are described in the FamilySearch Catalog by county and town.

Court Records

Indiana’s courts changed form several times, and their records reach well beyond lawsuits into estates, guardianships, naturalizations, and name changes. The main courts a researcher encounters are:

• Circuit Court, in each county from the territorial and early statehood period — the principal trial court for civil and criminal matters, and, for most of the state’s history, the court that also handled probate; the Clerk of the Circuit Court holds its records and often the county’s naturalizations.
• Probate Court, a separate system that existed from 1829 to 1852 — wills, administrations, and guardianships, kept in their own order books.
• Court of Common Pleas, 1852 to 1873 — created to take over probate and lesser civil and criminal business; abolished in 1873, when its cases passed to the Circuit Courts.
• Some counties later added a separate Superior or Probate Court to share the caseload.

Order books and complete-record books for many counties are held at the Indiana Archives and Records Administration, others remain with the county clerks, and many are on digitized microfilm through FamilySearch.

Ethnic/Minority Records

Indiana drew settlers from many directions, and knowing where a group settled points to the records most likely to document a family.

• Quakers from the Carolinas. A large early migration of Friends out of North Carolina and Virginia settled the Whitewater Valley in Wayne, Randolph, and Henry counties; their meeting records (see Church Records) are among the richest sources in the state.
• Germans. Heavy German immigration filled the Ohio River counties, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, largely Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic; church registers are the primary record.
• Irish. Irish laborers arrived with canal and railroad construction and settled in the cities and along the lines; Catholic parish and cemetery records are key sources.
• African Americans. People of African descent lived in Indiana from its earliest years, including early free Black farming communities such as Lyles Station in Gibson County and Roberts Settlement in Hamilton County. Indiana was crossed by the Underground Railroad, with Levi and Catharine Coffin at Newport (now Fountain City) among its best-known figures. The Indiana Historical Society and the Indiana State Library hold African American church, community, and newspaper resources.
• Native nations. The Miami homeland ran along the Wabash from the Fort Wayne portage southwest, with the Big Miami Reserve set aside in north-central Indiana in 1818 and broken up in the 1830s and 1840s; the Potawatomi held the north until the removals of 1838. Treaty and land-cession records are at the Indiana Archives and Records Administration, and federal Indian census rolls and treaty and annuity papers are held by the National Archives; several successor tribal organizations continue in Indiana and Oklahoma.
• Later industrial immigration. Eastern and southern Europeans settled the northwestern Calumet region around Gary and East Chicago to work in the mills; federal census and naturalization records document these communities.

Immigration and Naturalization

Indiana is an inland state with no ocean port, so most immigrants arrived through eastern seaboard, Great Lakes, or Ohio River ports and then moved inland; passenger-arrival research therefore centers on those external ports rather than on Indiana itself. Naturalization, however, happened locally.

• Before 1906 any court of record could naturalize, and in Indiana this was almost always the county Circuit Court, so declarations and petitions are scattered through county court order books; the Indiana Historical Society compiled an index to pre-1907 naturalizations found across the ninety-two counties, available through indianahistory.org.
• After 1906 the process was federalized; federal naturalizations for Indiana are held by the National Archives at Chicago, and a Soundex index covers the courts of the Chicago region, including those serving northwestern Indiana.
• The FamilySearch collection of Indiana naturalization records and indexes and the Indiana Archives and Records Administration digital indexes are free finding aids to the state and county records.

Land Records

As a federal (public-domain) state, Indiana was surveyed by the United States into townships, ranges, and sections and its land sold through district land offices before settlement. The first transfer of most land is therefore a federal patent recorded by the General Land Office; every later transfer between individuals is a deed recorded by the county recorder. Two bodies of older, non-federal title also exist: the French donation lands at Vincennes and Clark’s Grant near the Falls of the Ohio.

The federal land offices. Different offices sold different parts of the state, and knowing which office served an area tells you where the entry papers were created:

• Cincinnati, Ohio sold the earliest Indiana land, “the Gore” in the southeast, opened after the Treaty of Greenville.
• Vincennes (first sales 1807) served the southwest; Jeffersonville (from 1808) the southeast; Brookville, later moved to Indianapolis, the east and center; Terre Haute, later Crawfordsville, the west; Fort Wayne the northeast; and LaPorte, later Winamac, the northwest.
• The Indianapolis office absorbed the unsold lands of the closing offices; when it closed in the 1870s, the federal land records for Indiana were transferred to the state.

The major tracts. Several large grants and cessions shaped where settlement records survive:

• Clark’s Grant (the Illinois Grant): 150,000 acres set aside by Virginia in 1781 for George Rogers Clark and his Revolutionary soldiers, in present-day Clark, Floyd, and Scott counties; Clarksville, laid out in 1784, was the first American town in the Northwest.
• The Vincennes Tract and French donation lands: the older French and confirmed American grants around Vincennes, documented apart from the federal survey.
• The Gore: the southeastern wedge opened after 1795 and sold through Cincinnati.
• The New Purchase (Treaty of St. Mary’s, 1818): the large central cession from which all or part of dozens of counties were later formed.
• The Twelve-Mile Purchase and the other treaty cessions of 1804 through 1840 progressively opened the remainder of the state, and the Big Miami Reserve, set aside in 1818 and broken up over the following decades, yielded several north-central counties.
• State-granted lands — including the Indianapolis Donation, the Michigan Road lands, and the saline, seminary, swamp, and canal lands — passed by state rather than federal title and are documented in state records.

Where to search. The Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records site provides free images of the original federal patents and survey plats. The Indiana Archives and Records Administration holds the tract books, entry papers, and plat maps transferred from the land offices, with online indexes for several of them, and the National Archives at Chicago holds the land-entry case files. County recorders hold the grantor and grantee indexes and deed books for all private transfers, and FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed deeds and land papers searchable by every name they contain.

Military Records

Indiana men served in every American conflict from the frontier wars onward, and the state’s published rosters are unusually complete.

• Territorial militia and the Indian wars: militia service, including the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, is documented in State Archives holdings and published rosters.
• War of 1812, Black Hawk War, and Mexican War: muster and service records are held by the Indiana Archives and Records Administration, and the units are described in the published record of Indiana organizations in the Mexican, Civil, and Spanish-American wars.
• Civil War: the central source is the eight-volume Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Indiana (Terrell), which prints the roster and service outline of every Indiana regiment and battery; it is free on HathiTrust and the Internet Archive and underlies the free Indiana Civil War Muster Roll index at the State Archives. The Indiana Legion was the wartime state militia.
• Spanish-American War and World War I: service-record abstracts are held by the State Archives, and county clerks have received veterans’ discharge records since the early twentieth century.

Probate Records

Probate — wills, administrations of intestate estates, and guardianships of minors — is among the richest sources for family relationships. In Indiana the jurisdiction shifted among courts, so the year of death tells you which court to search:

• Early statehood: the Circuit Courts (and, briefly, courts of common pleas) handled probate.
• 1829–1852: a separate Probate Court in each county kept its own probate order books.
• 1852–1873: the Court of Common Pleas held probate jurisdiction.
• 1873 onward: jurisdiction returned to the Circuit Courts (with separate probate or superior courts in a few counties). The estate file — petition, will or letters, bond, and inventory — usually names the heirs.

Online, Indiana Wills and Probate Records, 1798–1999 ($) on Ancestry is name-searchable across most counties, county probate images are browsable free on FamilySearch, and FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed wills and estate files searchable by every name they contain.

Tax Records

Tax lists place a family in a specific township and year and are valuable substitutes where censuses or deeds are missing; several consecutive years can reveal when a young man came of age, moved, or died and left heirs.

• Early territorial and county tax duplicates are among the oldest surviving name lists for Indiana; the Indiana Archives and Records Administration holds early lists, and county auditors and treasurers hold the later assessment rolls.
• U.S. IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862–1918 ($) — the Civil War–era and later federal income, license, and excise taxes, covering Indiana; the 1862–1874 assessment lists are also free on FamilySearch.
• Personal-property and land-tax duplicates were kept at the county level throughout the state’s history and remain the most consistent year-by-year record of a resident landowner.