Every September in Indiana Harbor (East Chicago), Lake County, Indiana there is an annual parade and events for Fiestas Patrias, a celebration of Mexican Independence Day. The earliest record of this Hoosier staple celebration of Mexican heritage was in 1924. The Times reported on August 21, 1924, a planned September celebration of Mexican Independence being […]
“It was during these hard years of the early 1930s that mass groups of the parishioners departed in whole train loads for Mexico.” Silver Anniversary, Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish, East Chicago, Indiana, 1927-1952 Part One of this blog series laid out how many individuals were repatriated to Mexico by 1932, how it was funded, […]
Ernest Merritt, born in Indianapolis two weeks after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, would grow up to become the head of the physics department at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He worked closely with Edward Nichols, with whom he co-founded the important physics journal Physical Review. His biographical memoir on the National Academy of Sciences […]
A collection of materials from the Merritt family of Indianapolis, recently added to our collections, embodies the wide variety of activities in which they engaged. From early industrial success to service during the Civil War, parks, schools, women’s suffrage, elder care, and even an 8-year-old’s entrepreneurial spirit, it’s all here. George Merritt, once termed “the […]
Indianapolis of the 19th and 20th centuries never had a large enough Asian population that would lend itself to create nor sustain an ethnic commercial corridor such as a “Chinatown.” This is partly due to a series of anti-Asian laws which stymied potential growth. From 1892 through 1948, Monument Circle would host a number of […]
As we’ve explored Sylvia Dichner’s life (Part I and Part II) in Indianapolis, we have encountered the man who would become her husband, Isadore “Izzy” Weiss. While Sylvia’s story connects us to life in Indianapolis as a young working person in the Great Depression, Isadore’s life links the past with the unfortunate current events we […]
In the third and final installment of my blog series about my great-grandmother, we will explore her ethnic identity and how it has been carried into my generation. If you need to catch up on my previous blogs on this topic, you can visit Part 1 and Part 2. Whiting and other Northwest Indiana cities […]
In my first installment, I discussed Veronica Sabol Jadrnak, my great grandmother, and her ties to the Region’s (read: Northwest Indiana) industry. While these bits of history are interesting and telling, I wonder so much more about her life in the early 20th century. Why was she nearly 28 when she married (an advanced age […]
In the fifteen years plus that I have been on staff in the Indiana Historical Society, I’ve discovered one of my favorite groups to work with are genealogists. While we do have some traditional resources, such as AncestryLibrary and NewspaperArchive that assist genealogists in their quest for dates (birth, marriage, death), most of our resources […]
Bob and Luella McBride had been married two months when twenty-year-old Bob was thrust into a global war as a medic with the Seventeenth Airborne Division, including becoming part of the last-gasp German offensive at the Battle of the Bulge. Luella Hart, nineteen when she married, relied on her sisters and Bob’s parents for support […]
