PLACE / TIME / EVIDENCE
Same place.
Different county.
Follow Indiana’s changing county lines. Find the jurisdiction, read what changed, and choose your next place to research.
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View cropped to modern Indiana. Historical counties sometimes extended beyond this frame. Shapes are generalized, not property boundaries. NCA = non-county area. Labels thin automatically to reduce overlap.
THE PAPER TRAIL
County chronology
Includes organization and attachment events that may not change the drawn boundary.
WATCH THE CHANGES
Indiana through time in 28 seconds.
A silent, captioned illustration of the explorer’s historical data. Use the controls above to investigate an exact date.
Read the demonstration transcript
Indiana’s county boundaries changed over time. Solid lines show historical counties; dashed lines show the 2024 comparison. By the end of the historical dataset in 2000, there are 92 counties. Compare March 31 and April 1, 1824: Allen County was created from Delaware New Purchase and Non-County Area 4. Choose a date, read the cited change and confirm who holds the records today.
SOURCE NOTES
A map is a starting point.
Historical evidence
Peggy Tuck Sinko, Indiana Historical Counties, digital compilation by Laura Rico-Beck and Emily Kelley, edited by John H. Long. Newberry Library, 2010. Coverage: December 9, 1778 through December 31, 2000. Event descriptions and citations are retained from the dataset.
Open Newberry’s Indiana atlas ↗ · Bibliography ↗ · Historical commentary ↗
What the lines cannot tell you
A county could exist before it operated independently. Read its dated attachment and organization notes. A historical jurisdiction does not establish which repository holds a record today.
The map represents the atlas’s colonial, territorial and state administrative claims. It is not a map of Indigenous nations, land ownership or a complete account of sovereignty.
Modern comparison: U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 generalized counties ↗. This is a dated reference layer, not a verified 2026 boundary survey.
Data treatment, exceptions and reuse
Historical polygons are clipped to the modern Indiana footprint and simplified to 0.001 degrees for display. Coordinates are plotted at an Indiana overview scale; no invalid source geometries required repair during conversion. Original downloaded files are retained separately. Near-boundary questions require the source descriptions and more detailed maps.
The downloaded Indiana package contains 475 historical polygon versions and 798 chronology entries. Its commentary explains interpretive decisions, including early territorial jurisdictions. Organization and attachment events may appear in the chronology without changing the drawn boundary.
Newberry’s current reuse statement specifies CC0. Its download page says older license notices included in the files are superseded. Reviewed October 26, 2026. No claim is made that Brick Wall Protocol independently rechecked every cited law.