'A researching nerd Super Bowl moment': How new $102 million home elevates Indiana archives

Indianapolis Star

13-05-2025

Judy Jones eagerly watches for a piece of once-hidden family history every time she drives along German Church Road on the northeast side. Just south of 52nd Street, she glances west across a field to spot a little white fence that encircles a tiny cemetery. There, her great-great-great grandmother, who died in 1860, lies buried beneath a toppled headstone and a patch of trees, tall and leaning.
"I'll be driving down the road and I have to look for it," said Jones, who lives in Irvington.
For most of her life, Jones had no idea Patty Roney's grave existed — or that she descended from one of the first families to settle in Marion County shortly after its early nineteenth-century founding. In 2018, Jones pieced together information from old maps, history books and land records to discover how her ancestors traveled to Indiana from Ohio to buy a plot and help build a road. Finding her pioneer roots ignited her desire to learn more.
Those who research history and their family ancestry like Jones will soon have an easier path to uncovering untold stories when the new Indiana State Archives Building opens late in the summer of 2026. The 128,000-square-foot structure, currently under construction, sits next to the canal in the block just north of Ohio Street between West Street and Senate Avenue.
The $102 million project will become the first site specifically built for the Indiana Archives and Records Administration's (IARA) permanent collection. The agency preserves historical records related to Indiana's statehood and institutions, such as prison materials related to the infamous thief John Dillinger, photos of the Beatles' 1964 concert at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, the state's 1816 and 1851 constitutions and blueprints of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.
The new building and its amenities — which include expanded climate-controlled storage, a glass-enclosed reading room that overlooks the canal and space for records conservation — will offer a drastically different experience than the current archives building. For almost 25 years, the agency's collection has been housed on the east side at a former RCA record-stamping plant building known to leak.
What's more, the archives' new downtown location adjacent to the Indiana State Library, Indiana Historical Bureau and Indiana Historical Society will create a corridor where researchers and genealogists from around the state can more easily move among the sister institutions.
"This is a researching nerd Super Bowl moment for sure," said Indianapolis City-County archivist Jordan Ryan, who often works with IARA.
As word spreads about the new limestone and glass addition to the downtown cityscape, archivists hope the high-profile building will raise awareness about the treasures inside that have been helping genealogists and researchers understand the state's story for more than a century.
About 25 years ago, as urban historian Leon Bates wrapped up his work at closing time in the Indiana State Library's basement, an archivist asked about his research. He told her he couldn't find much about Dr. Joseph Ward, a Black surgeon who opened a sanitarium around 1907 after he was barred from treating Black patients at City Hospital.
Don't leave, the archivist told Bates, as she disappeared among shelves brimming with historic records. She returned with a Board of State Charities file containing detailed reports that described the white tile walls, gas lights, maternity area and X-ray machine at Ward's Sanitarium and Nurses' Training School on Indiana Avenue. Thanks to Bates' research, a historic marker at 21st Street and Boulevard Place now honors Ward.
The state's permanent historical records have so far lived a somewhat nomadic existence. Founded in 1906 as a division of the Indiana State Library, the archives became part of the Indiana Commission of Public Records in 1979. The agency was renamed the Indiana Archives and Records Administration in 2015.
The collection grew in the state library until 2001, when it moved to 6440 E. 30th St. to alleviate space issues in a move that was meant to be temporary, said Claire Alderfer, assistant director of IARA. Over the years, leaks in the building resulted in many soaked documents and hours of work.
"Fortunately, the box and the folders do a pretty good job of keeping the water from damaging the record beyond use. But we would have to pull out each folder, open it up, let it dry, maybe flip the pages the next day, let it dry some more, replace all the folders, replace all the boxes," Alderfer said. "It's a pretty significant time and resource strain when it happens, but we've been fortunate to not have experienced significant loss."
Discussions for a state-of-the-art archives facility have been in the works since the turn of the century. The new downtown archives building was approved in the 2021 state budget during Gov. Eric Holcomb's administration.
The new IARA headquarters will unite the agency's offices, imaging lab and archives, which have been spread out between the east-side building and downtown Government Center. Unlike the tight Indiana State Library basement, where Bates found the information about Ward's sanitarium, the new building will allow the permanent archival collection room to grow, thanks to 130,000 cubic feet of storage space. The collection currently takes up about 90,000 cubic feet of space in the 30th Street center, Alderfer said. The state's nonpermanent records will remain at the 30th Street location, she said.
Currently, only the paper and microfilm vaults, which contain extremely sensitive and significant historical records like Dillinger's Indiana State Prison mugshot, possess the temperature and humidity ideal for preservation. The new archives building, which backs up to a parking garage, will leverage its lack of sun on one side to protect better the historic materials stored there.
In 1814 a slaveowner bought teenager Mary Bateman Clark in Kentucky, brought her to Vincennes and indentured her as his servant before selling her indenture to his uncle, General Washington Johnston. Seven years later, Clark challenged Johnston's right to keep her in servitude. She lost that Knox County Court case and then won her appeal in the Indiana Supreme Court, which ruled that her service was involuntary.
In the early 2000s, Clark's great-great-great granddaughter Eunice Trotter worked with state archivists to find those court documents, unearthing the facts behind the story that had been passed down as family lore. Trotter wrote a book about Clark's case, which proved to be a landmark in the fight against the subterfuge of slavery in Indiana. A historic marker dedicated to Clark now stands outside the Knox County Courthouse.
The state is sliding the new five-level Indiana State Archives Building into a narrow lot just south of New York Street between the canal and the Senate Avenue Parking Garage.
"When we designed that garage, we planned on having what is called a liner building on the canal. So we actually held the garage off of the canal so that it would be available for future building," said Bill Browne, the principal and CEO of Ratio, the architect of record for the exterior, interior and landscape design.
The archives' staff and visitors will have views of the canal and downtown cityscape through windows on the west and south sides. Browne and Alderfer said the new facility will include:
The darker east side of the building next to the Senate Avenue garage is ideal for sensitive historic records, which will be stored on high-density shelving at street level and above. The new building primarily uses Indiana limestone cut into thin slices and affixed to a strong, water-resistant backing, Browne said.
The court records that Trotter, who's now director of the Black Heritage Preservation program at Indiana Landmarks, studied are among the 90,000 cubic feet of records in the state archive's permanent collection, including information related to naturalization, state hospitals, land sales, the military, prisons, orphanages and foster care.
Any one of those records can become a clue for someone looking to unearth forgotten family history or, as Jones puts it, one of those moments that feels like angels singing.
Judy Jones didn't expect to find her great-great-great grandmother's grave when she first pulled out a protractor, an old map, Google Earth and records of the land that belonged to Patty Roney's father Jeremiah Plummer. Seeking to find the land her ancestors owned, Jones determined that the plot was located at German Church Road and 52nd Street. And then she noticed a tiny little spot labeled as a cemetery.
After driving to the field with her neighbor, the two found Roney's grave. As Jones stood there, she imagined how her ancestors used the nearby Indian Creek, where their houses and church might have stood more than 170 years ago. She thought about watching "Little House on the Prairie" as a child, stunned at her family's own pioneer past.
"I never dreamed that I would find it right here, pretty much in my backyard," Jones said.
While educational institutions and websites like Ancestry.com offer myriad digitized records, genealogists often need to visit physical locations to see materials that aren't online. Studying documents in person can yield surprising rewards, said Allison DePrey Singleton, president of the Indiana Genealogical Society.
"Sitting with the documents themselves, sometimes you can have those kismet moments where you have that 'aha' with something maybe written on the back of a document that you didn't see in the digitized version," she said.
Many researchers wind up searching collections at multiple sites, which makes the new archive building's proximity to the Indiana State Library and Indiana Historical Society significant, said Ron Darrah, vice president and librarian of the Genealogical Society of Marion County.
"If you're a researcher from out of town, for instance, you can just park in the garage down there somewhere, and you've got a lot of stuff that you won't (have to) go very far to find. That's a major improvement," he said.
At the state archives, Jones found Central State Hospital records for one of Roney's children, who spent time as a patient there. Trotter has searched wills, genealogical and property records of White slaveowners since Black people were often transferred among White family members as indentured or domestic servants.
Barbara Cline Hutchinson, president of the Genealogical Society of Marion County, has researched her own family's past using her relatives' and county records. Growing up, Hutchinson visited the southern Indiana farmland where her Amish and Mennonite ancestors built homes in the late 1800s, and she returned as an adult to reconnect to her roots.
"That's what genealogists are looking for — the real part of them, of who they are," Hutchinson said.
She hopes to discover more when the new archives open. So does Trotter, who's continuing to research Clark and her husband Samuel Clark's role in Indiana's early history.
"Being able to do that was such an exhilarating spiritual lift that says, 'Hey, my family mattered in Indiana,'" said Trotter, a former IndyStar editor and reporter. "This case set a precedent that helped others escape this horrible institution of enslavement."
With the new downtown building raising the profile of Indiana's historic records, archivists look forward to assisting with more discoveries like these.
"As more people use the archives," Alderfer said, "other researchers become aware of a particular collection and find a way to tell a new story that hasn't been told yet."
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