Get To Know Jordan Ryan, City-County Archivist

What, exactly, is your job?

My HR-official title is administrator of public records, which means nothing to anyone. It’s for both Indianapolis and Marion County, so the title we’ve been using with the public is city-county archivist. That seems to be more accessible to people than government jargon. I help collect, manage, and make accessible government-related records for 45 different agencies, including city offices, county offices, and some quasi-governmental and municipal corporations.

How’s that going?

We have an almost 150-year backlog of records management, archiving, and collections ahead of us. Indianapolis is just over 200 years old, and my position has had only one predecessor. It’s a huge project, and I won’t finish everything. All I can do is leave it better than I found it. But it’s nevertheless amazing. You find stuff that historians were looking for 10, 20, maybe even 100 years ago. You get to help scholars, neighborhoods doing research about their area, and genealogists. You’re doing detective work. Every week we have a moment when we scream with joy because we found something we thought was lost forever. It’s fun.

How did you become involved in the Greenlawn Cemetery project? Nobody here at the city could do cemetery compliance. I used to work for the person who oversaw all of the historic cemeteries throughout the state in the State Historic Preservation Office. The Department of Metropolitan Development hired me as a contract archivist and then-Deputy Mayor Judith Thomas brought me in to work on Greenlawn. Then I was made part of the full-time staff, and the Greenlawn work became an official part of my job. I have multiple cemetery projects, but the Greenlawn excavation is the biggest.

For readers who haven’t followed this, why is Greenlawn Cemetery so important?

It was the first public cemetery in Indianapolis, and back in the day, it covered at least 25 acres. We only have about 1.5 acres involved in the Henry Street bridge project. The thing that makes Greenlawn interesting is that it dates to the city’s very beginning, before even Crown Hill Cemetery, which opened during the 1860s. Prior to that, just about everybody was buried together at Greenlawn. Black and white. Young and old. Rich and poor. They all wound up there.

How is it possible that such a significant cemetery could be “forgotten” and built over?

I try to remind people that we shouldn’t think about it in terms of today’s values. You have to put yourself in the moment it happened. And in the moment this happened, professional anthropology didn’t exist. There weren’t even any laws governing the care and maintenance of cemeteries until the Historic Preservation Act in the 1960s. Since a lot of these people were buried in the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, you may not have had any of their family left by, say, 1890 to give a damn. The city was growing and industrializing, so then who’s to stop them from building on top of the cemetery? I’m not defending what happened, but it helps to remember it was a different time.

So then, cemeteries like this get erased more often than we realize?

Every city erased a cemetery during this era of growth during the Industrial Revolution. Yes, these kinds of erasures are much more common than we would like to think.

How often did you visit the Greenlawn excavation, and what did you see?

I went to the excavation probably once a week to work with the principal investigators. Or if there was a really interesting discovery, they might call me and let me know just so I could see it for myself. We officially wrapped the excavation in October, so we’re not out there anymore. If you go now, it just looks like dirt being prepped for a road. We ended up finding 1,709 grave shafts. Most shafts contained full, partial, or isolated remains. That is a lot. And I don’t even know how many thousands of artifacts we have. Everything from glass coffin viewing windows, to coffin hardware, to rings inscribed with initials, to dolls buried with children.

What happens to the remains and the objects that were uncovered?

The remains will be relocated. The artifacts people were buried with will all go back into the ground with them. But the gravestones are often heavily damaged or gone. We have to decide if we’re doing new stones, and if so, see how many people we can identify so we can put a name on the stone. We need to build a biographical sketch of each set of remains. We’ve got years of genealogical research ahead of us to figure all this out.

How long will it be before the Greenlawn dead are reinterred?

I think it’s going to be a long process because of the sheer number of remains. There’s a lot of analysis and documentation that has to happen, per state law. The State Historic Preservation Office has to approve a burial plan before we can even begin.

What kinds of stories will emerge with the people you’ve found?

It’s been really interesting to see all of the names that are on the headstones and footstones. It’s going to be an amazing anthology of the first 40 or 50 years after the creation of Indianapolis. If your family has lived in this city for a long time, you may have a relative who was buried there, but they’ve been covered up for so long that they’ve been erased by time, by development. It’s our duty to uncover their identities and reassociate them with their names and biographies. This is a huge community engagement opportunity, as well as for all citizens who potentially have ancestors there. We’re going to find the earliest Indianapolis politicians. We’re going to find the guy who worked at the local tavern. We’re going to find the blacksmith. We’ll find the people who literally made this city. I think this project is a gift, both to me and to the city.

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