David, I'm not familiar with the barn building styles of Indiana, but if I was in your shoes, I would try to connect the local building style and ideas of farm operation back to the homeland. I happen to live in southern fringe of the so-called Pennsylvania barn domain. Most of the old local barns are forebay bank barns, the majority are Pennsylvania barns with maybe a 15% to 20% minority are the steeply sloped Sweitzer barn. Very few but some have cribbed framed features. Most of the barn stock seems to have timber frames that have American evolved framing systems. The southern part of the county, Jefferson WV, lost a large portion of the barn stock during the Civil War, so it is common to see replacement barns built after the war in a German style on English plantation type farms.
So my point is, see if you can tell something about the local history and development even if gets a little mixed up.
