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The county's first record book, as reprinted in the 1875 Combination Atlas — the founding frame at first hand
What it is: St. Joseph County's first government book survives for this build inside the 1875 atlas's reprint, and the Government file's founding enforcement record is fixed from it, first-hand at that remove: the county governed first by a Board of Justices; the act of 19 January 1831 substituting the Board of Commissioners; the September 1831 term allowing Samuel L. Cottrell $32 "for services rendered as sheriff"; the November 1831 term appointing constables Calvin Lilly, Joseph Cissna, Druliner (the given name imperfectly preserved in the atlas text — not guessed) and John Garrard, and spreading the jail-building order on the records (first book, p. 35); "at this time Benjamin McCarty was sheriff"; the grand and petit jury panels drawn at the January 1832 term.
Its standing, from this build's experience: the reprint is a carrier, and the file treats it as one — but it is a carrier that preserves the record's own order, and that order decides a question the summaries flatten: the documents name Cottrell paid as sheriff in September 1831 and McCarty as sheriff "at this time," with Chapman converging on Cottrell for "several terms." The build prints both men in the record's order and refuses to elect a single "first sheriff" the documents do not elect.
Where it fails: at numeral strength, downstream. The fine polygon of the 1836 and 1840 township orders — the "section and a half" line as actually run — does not survive in the digitized texts at the strength the Land file needs; the settling source is the commissioners' record itself (the county board orders of 1835–1840) with the county surveyor's township maps, and it stands as a named gap in the harvest. A reprint, however faithful, is still a remove, and the apparatus counts it as one.
Sources:
- The Commissioners' Record, first book, as reprinted in Higgins, Belden & Co. (1875).