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1880–2012 · THE COUNTY AND TOWNSHIP HISTORIES
The historians are counted here as authors in their own right, first, before any novelist — and each is carried by titles and dates, not by biography alone. First, the Chapman county history: History of St. Joseph County, Indiana; together with sketches of its cities, villages and townships, educational, religious, civil, military, and political history; portraits of prominent persons, and biographies of representative citizens (Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1880; 986 pages in the digitised copy). The title page itself teaches the grading lesson this section runs on: “Chapman” is the publishing house, Chas. C. Chapman & Co. of Chicago, not a seated local author — the work is a corporate county history, and its Harris and Clay township chapters are the first written Granger.
Second, Timothy Edward Howard (1837–1916) — judge of the Indiana Supreme Court 1893–1899, Notre Dame professor, president of the Northern Indiana Historical Society — carried by the fullest bibliography this section can now print. From the Who's Who in America record of his works: Excelsior, a book of essays (1868); Uncle Edward's Stories, a book for children (no date given in the record reached); A History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac, from 1842 to 1892 (1895); Laws of Indiana, a manual (1900); The Indiana Supreme Court, a historical sketch issued by the Northern Indiana Historical Society (1900); Musings and Memories, a volume of verse (1905) — which also seats Howard, a judge, in this section's poetry line below; and his spine work, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, two volumes (Chicago and New York: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1907; volume 1, 826 pages in the digitised copy).
Third, the one keeper the ground produced for itself. The Denham Collection index at The History Museum catalogues the book exactly: The History of Harris Township, St. Joseph County, Indiana, by Germain Goff (1980), the copy in Box 18 autographed by the author. The spelling of the author's first name prints in conflict, whole, as the sources give it: the record and the museum index give “Germain Goff”; Harris Township Trustee Kenneth E. Lindsay's August 2020 Granger Gazette history piece gives “Germaine Goff's 1980 book The History of Harris Township.” No source reached settles the spelling, and none is silently picked here. Fourth, Jeanne Denham (born October 11, 1922, in Minneapolis; died July 27, 2012) — first president of the South Bend Area Genealogical Society and for more than thirty years the county's official and unofficial historian. Her bibliography is of a different kind and prints at its true form: not trade books but the eighty-one archival boxes of the Jeanne Denham Collection at The History Museum, and, with Robert Denham, the newspaper history series “South Bend Remembers: A Newspaper History of Old South Bend” (c. 2000–2006), catalogued in her own files. The county's memory-keeper is an author whose work is an archive.
Sources: Archive.org / HathiTrust title pages and the Online Books Page listings for the Chapman (1880) and Howard (1907) histories; Who's Who in America entry for Timothy Edward Howard, via the World Biographical Encyclopedia, for his dated works list; South Bend Area Genealogical Society, the Jeanne Denham Collection index (sbags.org, consulted November 2026), for the Goff title, the Denham biography and the “South Bend Remembers” series; Granger Gazette, August 2020, Trustee Lindsay's Harris Township history, for the conflicting Goff spelling.