By ATMIKA IYER
for Capitol News Illinois
and Medill Illinois News Bureau
[email protected]
SPRINGFIELD – For two decades, Dave Joens has led the Illinois State Archives, the government agency tasked with preserving official government documents with historic value. The job of caring for historic records has been a natural fit for Joens, he said, who has been interested in history since reading Abraham Lincoln biographies as a child in Springfield.
During his time as the state archivist, Joens led efforts to preserve records in digital formats, which improved the public’s ability to access those documents.
He helped Illinoisans understand the value of the archives by creating an online exhibit of the 100 most valuable documents at the Illinois State Archives, from calls for a constitutional convention to allow slavery in Illinois to the oath of office signed by then-state Sen. Barack Obama in 1997.
Joens also increased the archives’ capacity to hold records and created an internship program to help people learn the professional duties of archivists. It’s a significant step for an agency that earned international attention for establishing the field of professional archival practice—apart from libraries and historical societies—more than a century ago.
Now, though, Joens is retiring from the post to pursue another passion: writing history books.
Joens has been a janitor, journalist, a biographer, a press secretary for the Democratic caucus in the Illinois Senate and the Illinois state archivist. He served in the Army stationed in Germany, wrote speeches for Illinois state senators and digitized the state archives. Though Joens explored many professions over the course of his career, his love for Illinois history has been at the heart of his work.
History from an early age
Joens was born in 1965 in Springfield, a city where Lincoln lived for 20 years and where the 16th president’s legacy looms large to this day.
As a young child, Joens was an avid consumer of biographies. He got started, not surprisingly, with biographies of Lincoln that his older brothers had at home.
“And then I started to fall in love with history,” Joens said. “I read biographies just all the time. You start with one subject in history, and you start moving to the others.”
His family moved to Joliet by the time he was in fourth and fifth grade. That’s where he discovered the bookmobile, a mobile library. Joens said he’d bring home 20 books—all biographies—when the bookmobile rolled into Joliet once every week.
“History was just there,” Joens said. He went from reading about the past to writing about the present. In high school, Joens joined his school newspaper — a profession he would explore once again later in his career.
“Glenbard East came in second in the state baseball tournament,” Joens said of his high school. “And the article I wrote on that I’m still very, very proud of. I won a student press award for an editorial that I wrote, but it was that sports article that I really, really was proud of.”
Joens graduated from Northern Illinois University with a double major in political science and history and a minor in journalism. He then spent two years in the U.S. Army. When he came back, he used the Army College Fund to further his education with two master’s degrees—one in political science and another in history—and a Ph. D. in Illinois history. While he was getting his master’s degrees, he interned with a newspaper in Lisle where he reported on city council. Later he became a press secretary for the Illinois Senate Democratic Caucus.
A career of public service
During his time there, Joens also worked for the Black Caucus, recalling that he learned that the first Black person to serve in the Illinois state Senate was Adelbert Roberts. He assumed Roberts to be the first Black person to serve in the Illinois Legislature. He soon discovered that while Roberts was the first Black person to serve in the state Senate, a Black man named John. W. E. Thomas joined the Illinois House of Representatives in 1877, making him the first African American in the Illinois General Assembly.
After six years working for the state Senate, Joens took a position with the Legislative Study Center at the University of Illinois Springfield and continued his education. His discovery about Thomas influenced the trajectory of his research in higher education. After reading biographies so avidly as a child, Joens used his Ph.D to research and write his own on Thomas, which he later published as a book.
“It turned from a two-page article in a newsletter to a 20-page paper for the master’s history course I was taking, to my master’s thesis at 70 pages, to a 300-page dissertation and, thank God, just a 200-page book,” Joens said.
In 2004, Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White appointed Joens to the post of state archivist. The primary purpose of the state archives is to serve the state government, preserving past bills and administrative histories so they may be used for research. The archive also serves many historians, attorneys, sociologists and genealogists interested in researching the depths of their documents.
“He turned out to be a perfect fit,” White said in an interview. “He loves history, and he understands the importance of storing, preserving and making state documents available to the public. And I was just proud to have him work within my office for that period of time.”
Joens knew he had big shoes to fill. The first Illinois state archivist was Margaret Cross Norton who, Joens said, was heralded in the historian community for shaping the practice and profession of archival work.
“Her writings on archives became like a Bible for master’s-level classes on archives for like 40 years. So, you knew you were stepping into some pretty big shoes when you became director, not just of a state archive, but of the Illinois State Archives,” Joens said. “And I hope I’ve lived up to not just Margaret but her three successors as well.”
At the secretary of state’s office, Joens met Henry Haupt who, at the time, was working on traffic safety for the agency.
“He’s such an interesting person, because he’s very smart and well rounded. He has an incredibly strong affinity for history, especially when it’s related to the state of Illinois, and he’s fascinating to talk to,” said Haupt, who later went to serve as press secretary for White before helping found a media, advocacy and public policy consulting firm that contracts with Capitol News Illinois.
Joens said he was proud of a regranting program he developed that allowed different historical institutions in the state to receive small grants for their preservation efforts. He shared that the $5,000 grant helped Illinois College start their archives, and later Illinois College received a $2.5 million grant after its archives were up and running.
“We shouldn’t just be the State Archives doing the State Archives. We should be the State Archives helping the other archives in the state, especially small institutions,” Joens said.
But what he was most proud of, and what he considers his legacy, is his staff.
“The one thing I’m most proud of is I’ve got a very professional staff,” Joens said. “As a historian, especially in an institution like this, you look at what your legacy is going to be. Because you know who Margaret Cross Norton is or John Daly is or who my other predecessors are, and I’ve been telling people this recently, my legacy is my staff. These guys are awesome.”
As Joens prepares to depart his office, many have celebrated his tenure.
The state House passed a resolution earlier this month recognizing Joens’ contributions to the state archives, congratulating him on his retirement and honoring his 35 years in state government and public service.
“David Joens has a deep and abiding love for Illinois, authoring numerous scholarly journal and popular history articles about all aspects of Illinois history, two Almanac of Illinois Politics, and the book, ‘From Slave to State Legislator: John. W. E. Thomas, Illinois’ First African American Lawmaker,’” the resolution stated.
White, the former secretary of state who left office in 2023, said Joens “has served the state with honor and integrity and distinction, and I want to applaud him and thank him for a job well done.”
White, a former minor league baseball player with the Chicago Cubs who was later named a “Cub for life,” might appreciate one of Joens’ favorite acts in office.
It came in 2018, when the archivist was choosing the 100 most important documents in its collection.
“The last document we used … was the most valuable document we had. And I know you guessed Lincoln or the Constitutions or something,” Joens said. “But it’s from 2016 and it’s a House resolution congratulating the Chicago Cubs on winning the World Series, and in my mind, that’s the most important document.”
The resolution also congratulates Chicago Cubs player Ben Zobrist, from Eureka, Illinois, for being named MVP in the series. Zobrist hit .357 and had a key hit in Game 7 powering the Cubs to defeat the Cleveland Indians, the Cubs’ first World Series victory since 1908.
Joens said he knew it was time to retire when he hit 63, and that he has a few more book ideas to pursue during his retirement. Now done with his time preserving and increasing the accessibility of archives, Joens is excited to become a researching Illinois historian once more.
“I’m 63. I was like, you should retire at 65 so my line is I’m retiring at 63 and getting two years off for good behavior. So, that’s the line I’m using, but it was time for me to go,” Joens said. “I could have stuck around, but I have to go sometime, and this just seemed like the appropriate time.”
“I’ve been extremely fortunate. I mean absolutely no doubt. I mean almost to the point where you wonder if it’s divine intervention,” Joens said. “I’m very proud of the book that I wrote. … And I look back on my career, my journalism career, my time at the Senate, where I was assigned to the Black Caucus and it seemed to all point somehow to that. And you just, you scratch your head and you think it was meant to be.”
Atmika Iyer is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and a Fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
