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 epublications@marquette.edu.

If you have issues reading specific frames, please send an email to epublications@marquette.edu. 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.

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.
• March 25, 2024: Batch 1 (1924-1925, Reels 119-130) is released.
• April 16, 2024: Batch 2 (1925-1927, Reels 131-140) is released.
• June 9 2024: Batch 3 (1927-1928, Reels 141-150) is released.
• June 27, 2024: Batch 4 (1928-1929, Reels 151-160) is released.
• September 30, 2024: Batch 5 (1930-1932, Reels 161-177) is released.
• November 15, 2024: Batch 6 (1862-1884, Reels 2-10) is released.
• January 2, 2025 - Batch 7 (Reels 11-20) is released.
• April 14, 2025: Batch 8 (Reels 21-30) is released.

Staff:

• Danelle Orange
• Sharon Olson
• Ian Ruedinger