Archive Center and Genealogy at the Main Library — 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, and lists of registered voters from 1908 and 1914 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. The county lists its 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 at the Main Library.

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, such as 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.

One of the less known holdings at the Vero Beach Main Library is a collection on the 1715 Spanish treasure fleet. The 1715 Fleet Society described it as a vast collection of Fleet related archival material available for the asking, made up of old articles, newspaper accounts, photographs and related material, including firsthand accounts of salvage operations from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The society reported that the library does not offer direct access to this material over the internet, but publishes finding aids under its Guides and Indexes section, where 1715 Spanish Shipwrecks is the first item in the Indian River County and Florida Collections, and that the fleet material had been expanded to four boxes.

The library also put the collection on public view. For the 300th anniversary commemoration held in Vero Beach in July 2015, the society reported, the Indian River County Main Library prepared an exhibit of displays and posters on 1715 Fleet topics, including a Spanish galleon replica, a diorama of a 1715 Fleet survivors' camp and a shipwreck site map, and sponsored a series of events with the society.

Volunteers and a local society do much of the work. The county says the Archive Center & Genealogy Department depends greatly on volunteers who spend many hours per week assisting patrons and indexing and preserving donated materials, and the IRC History page credits volunteers with indexing the photograph and family files. The Indian River Genealogical Society is the main partner. Vero News reported on April 1, 2013 that the society, founded in 1983, was marking its 30th anniversary in the first floor meeting room of the Indian River County Main Library, and that under the department's longtime director the library's genealogy collection had grown from 250 to over 30,000 titles.

The same Vero News report listed the society's projects: two books, one listing the county's cemeteries and one showing Indian River County history in vintage postcards; research on the men honored on Veterans Memorial Island Sanctuary in Vero Beach; and participation in a nationwide project to index the 1940 U.S. Census. The society also teaches. The Indian River Guardian reported on July 5, 2018 that free Introduction to Genealogy classes were offered at the Main Library, with a sign-up sheet on the society's table across from the elevator on the second floor, next to the Archive Center.