The Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions (BCIM) was created in 1874 as the Office of the Commissioner for Catholic Indian Missions to protect, promote, and administer the Native American mission interests of the Catholic Church in the United States. Records in this group are organized by record group and then state or territory and year. Collection organization varies very little throughout the collection, however, prior to 1921, general correspondence was organized by location. Starting with Director Hughes, general correspondence was placed as its own subgroup within the collection and is organized alphabetically.
Currently, only the correspondence files are available on Epublications. Future additions to the BCIM collection will be assessed for suitability after the completion of the correspondence files.
The collection is not currently completely text searchable. Typed letters will be searchable via OCR. If you have transcriptions of any letters, please send your transcription along with a link to the record and the relevant frame number to [email protected].
If you have issues reading specific frames, please send an email to [email protected]. Please know that we have scanned at the best possible quality for the materials.
If you have questions about the collection that relates to the content, please use our ask an archivist form: https://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/askarch.php
To search these records:
If you are sure of the location of the information you are looking for, look at the state where the specific information is located or look at the original finding aid located at https://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/Mss/BCIM/BCIM-series1-1.php
Roadmap for additions to the collection:
As scanning proceeds, we will be uploading in 10 reel segments to keep the project in manageable parts. Items are uploaded in groups based on their box of origin and therefore, not all areas of the collection will be available in order. Please bear with us as we fill in the gaps.
We are investigating options to machine read handwritten items in the future. Our current goal is to get the collection online before focusing on enhancements to the collection.
- April 1979: scanned for microfilm.
- October 2, 2023: Scanning begins.
- July 31, 2026: 1862-1913 is completed (Reels 2-80)
- September 30, 2024: 1924-1932 completed (Reels 119-177)
- April 30, 2026: 1948-1974 complete. (Reels 237-288, except 241)
- Danelle Orange
- Sharon Olson
- Ian Ruedinger
- Phylix Asilevi
- Olivia Fleming
- Oluwaferanmi Dahunsi
- Sterling Johnston
- Emily Sullivan
- Amanda Pinto
Staff: