Archive Center and Genealogy at the Main Library in Vero Beach, Florida

The local history room of Indian River County is upstairs in downtown Vero Beach.

According to the county's genealogy page, the Julian W. Lowenstein Archive Center & Genealogy Department occupies the second floor of the Main branch at 1600 21st Street, with its own phone line, 772-400-6324. The county describes the department as currently 4000 sq ft and as a repository for many local collections, kept as a way to preserve photographs and documents. Both the building and the department's name trace to one gift: the county states that the Main Library opened 1 February 1991 due to a generous donation from the Julian W. Lowenstein family, and that the Archive Center & Genealogy Department was named in honor of Mr. Lowenstein.

The Archive Center is a county facility rather than a city one. The Indian River County Library System lists the Main branch in downtown Vero Beach alongside the North branch in Sebastian, the Brackett Library on the Indian River State College Mueller Campus, the Marian Fell Library in Fellsmere and a vending library in the Intergenerational Building. A county Law Library shares the second floor of the Main branch with the archive. As listed in October 2026, the Main Library is open Monday and Thursday from 10am to 8pm, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 10am to 5pm, Saturday from 10am to 4pm and Sunday from 1pm to 5pm.

The Archive Center's strength is paper that predates the county itself.

The library's IRC History page lists files and indexes, all located in the Archive Center, that begin with an 1886 Florida Gazetteer extract covering the towns of present-day Indian River County. A 1905 petition by citizens of the area to the Board of County Commissioners of St. Lucie County records the period before Indian River County was split off, a 1908 list of names removed from the registration books and a 1914 list of registered voters of St. Lucie County cover the same towns while they were still part of St. Lucie County. A 1916 business directory, a photocopy of the 1925 Fort Pierce City Directory and a 1931-1932 Southern Bell telephone directory fill in the next decades.

The single richest directory is the 1927 Vero Beach City Directory. The library's description says it includes a business directory, churches, hotels, historical information on each town in the county, an alphabetical index of Vero Beach families and a street directory, plus separate indexes of residents for Fellsmere, Sebastian, Roseland, Gifford, Wabasso and Winter Beach. Later sources on the same list include a 1940 census index, a 1945 Indian River County census index, a 1956 telephone directory of Vero Beach, Sebastian and Melbourne that was scanned at the library in April 2014, and births and weddings listed in the Vero Beach Press Journal from 2002 to 2008.

Photographs and family files make up the rest of the index list. The Archive Center keeps an index to 7000+ photographs from the Indian River County Historical Society collection and an index to 32,000+ photographs printed in newspapers and other media, most of them held in vertical files at the Vero Beach library. A separate list of Indian River County families shows every family with a vertical file, with pioneers who arrived before 1925 printed in bold. The library's Pioneer Index presents the pioneering families of Indian River County with a set of historic photos. Smaller files cover postcards, Florida maps, churches of Indian River County, the Vero Beach Woman's Club anniversary from 1915 to 2015 and a file titled Where Did Vero Beach Get Its Name?

Beyond local paper, the Vero Beach department works as a general genealogy library.

Indian River County lists the department's features as books and periodicals, genealogy databases, local history collections, microfiche, microfilm and maps, newspaper databases, microfiche and microfilm readers, and a document and photo scanner. Guides on the library site include a microfilm guide, a microfiche guide, an obituary search and a guide to the Rustin Military Collection.

The Subscription Databases page of the Indian River County Library names the commercial services available through the library: Ancestry Library Edition, which ProQuest describes as offering more than 5 billion names in thousands of collections; HeritageQuest Online; Fold3, a collection of original U.S. military records; NewsBank; a nineteenth century U.S. newspapers database; and British Library Newspapers, with more than 160 newspaper titles. Some of these, including NewsBank and Fold3, carry a link for access from outside the library, while the page calls Ancestry Library Edition similar but not identical to the consumer version. For Vero Beach researchers this means the census, military and newspaper searches that would otherwise need paid accounts can be run on the second floor of the Main Library.

Beyond its local files, the Vero Beach Archive Center holds a donated military history library and six cabinets of microfilm.

The county's guide to the Rustin Military Collection says it consists of nearly a thousand military books and periodicals collected by Richard E. Rustin, a former reporter and Wall Street Journal editor who served as a U.S. Navy officer from 1956 to 1959 and died in July 2008. His wife, Ginette Rustin, donated the collection from his estate to the Archive Center and Genealogy Department at the Indian River County Main Library between October 2009 and April 2010. It centers on World War I and World War II, also covers the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Mexican War, Korean War and Vietnam War, and is mostly regimental histories, campaign studies, military science, equipment and biography. The guide says the complete collection has been processed, is available to the public in the Genealogy Department and can be searched in the library's online catalog.

The department's microfilm index for cabinets 1 to 6, updated April 2021, lists the Main Library address and the department phone, 772-400-6324. Its first drawer of Florida census film includes the 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880 Florida mortality census schedules, the 1885 Florida federal census and the 1935 to 1945 Florida state census. The same index lists Florida Pioneer Certificate Application Files at the county and state level, the Florida Veterans Grave Registration Project and Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, and marks titles that are also available through Ancestry Library Edition or HeritageQuest.

Volunteers do much of the indexing and patron help at the Indian River County Archive Center.

The county's genealogy page says the Archive Center and Genealogy Department depends greatly on the support of the community and on volunteers who work many hours per week assisting patrons and on special projects such as indexing and preserving materials being researched or donated. The IRC History page opens with thanks to all the volunteers who have helped index Indian River County local history.

Several Vero Beach index files carry a volunteer's name. The page credits volunteer Marcia Eyberse with the index to more than 32,000 news media photographs and volunteer Jan Gay with most of the work on the Indian River County Families list of vertical files. The 1940 census index was prepared by Ronald Di Ninni, and the 1956 telephone directory of Vero Beach, Sebastian and Melbourne was donated by J. J. Wilson. Donors also built the military shelves: the Rustin Military Collection came to the department from Ginette Rustin in 2009 and 2010.

Research questions go to the department directly at 772-400-6324, and the county page lists the second floor of the Main branch at 1600 21st Street as its location. The Guides and Indexes page gathers the obituary search, the Family Search microfilm list, the microfilm and microfiche guides, the IRC History indexes and the Rustin Military Collection guide in one place.

Last verified: October 15, 2026, against the Indian River County library home page, the genealogy, subscription database, IRC History, Pioneer Index and Guides and Indexes pages, the Rustin Military Collection guide and the April 2021 microfilm cabinet index.