Author Archives: Charlie McAtee

Merry McGuire Christmas

McGuire Studio Inc., owned and operated by Joseph and Georgia McGuire, documented the built environment, businesses, people, and events around greater Indianapolis from the 1960s-1990s. Their body of work has been archived as the Joseph and Georgia McGuire Photograph Collection at the Indiana Historical Society. They took many iconic photos of aerial views and landmarks […]

The Legacy of Figueroa Printers, Indiana’s First Spanish Language Newspaper

The early Mexican communities of the 1920s in Indiana Harbor (East Chicago) and Gary were socially active and culturally vibrant. Early laborers came to Northwest Indiana and Chicago around 1918, recruited as foreign laborers to work in war-relief-related industries during World War I via Departmental Order No. 52461/202. The 1920s saw an increase in arrivals […]

Santa is Coming to Town

Visitors to the Indiana Historical Society November through early January each year, have no choice but to get into the Christmas spirit. There are Christmas trees everywhere thanks to our wonderful Festival of Trees. Our library likes to add a little holiday flair to our case exhibits as well. This year, I decided to focus […]

Pistol Packin’ Pastor: Part 2

This is Part 2 of the story of Wilbur Gibbons. To read part 1, click here. On Wilbur Gibbons’ 1918 draft registration card, he listed himself as a minister. Although he had been ordained in the Presbyterian church under the pretense that he would be working among the Apache in Arizona, he and his family […]

Pistol Packin’ Pastor: Part I

Figuratively speaking, the landscape of historical collections is strewn with Rabbit-Holes. Like Alice in Wonderland, if you choose one and jump down it, you never know when or where you’ll end up. Or who you’ll meet. As a processing archivist, I’m often the first to discover a particular hole and begin to map it out. […]

Are We Related?: Belcher

Welcome to the second installment of my Are We Related series. You can view the first blog about the Herndon family here. In this series, I am looking at surnames in the IHS collection and determining if a shared surname in my own line has any known ties. When I began working at the Indiana […]