I was recently asked what the WPA was.
The WPA stands for the Works Progress Administration. This project was in
operation during the Great Depression of the 1930s and provided work for
unemployed workers in all areas. In our case the Indiana WPA compiled huge
amounts of data from the original records and then produced indexes of the
material. As you can imagine researching the original documents would be so
time consuming that research would be nearly impossible, plus the original
documents would be destroyed by all those clerks thumbing through them. The
Indiana WPA was extremely active through out Indiana, producing indexes for
many of the counties. These documents are genealogical gems and we are lucky
that our state funded this work. Many states did not and consequently have
no indexes for their early records. To produce these indexes now would be
prohibitive in these days of cost cutting..
Tom Agan