Bound by Record and Memory: The Purrier Family of Vincennes, Indiana is a historical and genealogical narrative that reconstructs the lives of an African American family whose presence in Indiana predates statehood. Grounded in archival research and family memory, the book traces five generations of the Purrier–Silence–Joiner lineage, beginning with Lattie, an enslaved woman in late eighteenth-century Vincennes, and extending into the twentieth century through her descendants. The narrative draws upon baptismal and marriage registers, county records created to regulate free Black populations, military service files, church histories, and rare first-person testimony preserved in the Draper Manuscripts. These sources are presented with methodological care. Where documentation exists, it is cited directly. Where the historical record is incomplete or contradictory, those absences are acknowledged rather than reconstructed through conjecture. This approach reflects both the limitations of the archive and the ethical responsibility of historical recovery. Through detailed examinations of Francois and Toussaint Purrier, George Washington Purrier, Amanda Purrier, Civil War veteran William Silence, and Dorcas Silence Joiner, the book illuminates how African American families navigated enslavement, early freedom, legal surveillance, military service, faith, and community formation in the Midwest. Institutions such as St. Xavier Catholic Church and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church emerge as central sites of record-keeping, belonging, and continuity. More than a family genealogy, Bound by Record and Memory situates individual lives within broader systems of power, law, and remembrance. It demonstrates how documents created to control Black movement and identity now function as vital sources for reclaiming names, relationships, and lived experience. At the same time, it affirms the role of oral history and family memory in preserving meaning where official records fail.