The keeping of the record: trustees, associations, and the readers of stones

THE RECORD APPARATUS · 1834–PRESENT

This ground's dead are kept twice over — in the ground, by the township, and on paper, by a century of readers: The keeping in the ground follows the pattern the frame named. Harris Prairie and Salem passed to the Harris Township trustee, who keeps them today under the rule the Government leg documents; west of the line, the Brooks acre was deeded to Clay Township in 1856 in the same pattern, a generation earlier — the civil township as the valley's default cemetery association, on both sides of the place's line. Indiana's law makes the pattern general: trustees by law care for abandoned cemeteries, as the Government leg notes, and no independent cemetery association for either township ground appears in the record reached — whether a Harris Prairie or Salem cemetery association ever held the grounds before the trustee is a question the record reached does not answer, and it is entered in the closing roll with the township's deed and minute records named as settlers.

The keeping on paper is the genealogical century's work, and its apparatus is the county's: the Schuyler Colfax Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution read the county's grounds into print in its St. Joseph County, Indiana Cemetery Records volumes, which stand today in the Allen County Public Library's Reynolds Historical Genealogy Collection; the Works Progress Administration compiled a list of grave plots in St. Joseph County in 1939, preserved in the University of Notre Dame Archives' Saint Joseph County Records; the South Bend Area Genealogical Society's Graves Registration Project (1999–2007) registered the county's veterans' graves cemetery by cemetery; and the INGenWeb transcription project carries row-by-row readings — Sumption Prairie's arched-gate rows among them — with the county's cemetery survey work, Toni Cook's among it, standing behind the modern record of the small grounds. The state's own keeping is the Indiana Cemetery and Burial Grounds Registry, in which Harris Prairie stands entered, and the landmark file (Ordinance #113-99; the 2024 packet) that governs its fence, its drive, and its columbaria. Against that apparatus, the survival of the township grounds' own sexton and lot books — the working records from which a burial could be proved, as the township's rule requires proof — is not stated in any record reached; it is the last gap in the closing roll, with the trustee's office named as its settler.

Sources:

1. Daughters of the American Revolution, Schuyler Colfax Chapter — St. Joseph County, Indiana Cemetery Records, volumes I–III (Allen County Public Library, Reynolds Historical Genealogy Collection; archive.org).
2. University of Notre Dame Archives — Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Records: the 1939 WPA list of grave plots in St. Joseph County among the county records held.
3. South Bend Area Genealogical Society — the Graves Registration Project (1999–2007); the INGenWeb St. Joseph County cemetery transcriptions.
4. The Government leg of this build — the trustees' statutory care of abandoned cemeteries; the township keeping and the proof-of-lot rule that makes the lot books working records.