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on State Road 931, north of the town centre · burials evidenced by 1854
The town's cemetery stands on the old Michigan Road about a mile north of the town centre, and its stones have been read twice in print — but no carrier read for this section gives its founding. Its place-name point (41.54324° N, 86.26969° W, in the federal record; the aggregators' points sit a few hundred feet east, a variance printed and not merged) puts it on SR 931 where the highway leaves town. No founding instrument, deed, plat, donor, or first-burial date for the ground was reached in any carrier read; no church tie and no cemetery association is named for it anywhere in this record — it prints as the town's community cemetery at that strength only. Its present keeper is likewise not named by any carrier read: no sexton, board, town, or trustee contact was found, and the statute's three live possibilities — a town-owned ground outside the trustee's chapter, a township public cemetery in the trustee's care, or a fundless pre-1939 ground under the maintenance chapter — stand unchosen, with the settlers named's note (the town's and the trustee's published records; the WPA register's typescript history for this ground; the founding deed in the Recorder's books).
What the record does give is a terminus, and a story with it. In the fall of 2005, five tombstones, a foot-marker, and five small fragments were found in the manure pit of a mid-nineteenth-century barn on Osborne Road, half a mile west of U.S. 31; the genealogical society's cemetery chairman took charge of them and "recognized at once that the surnames were ones that are found in the Lakeville Cemetery about one mile from the barn." In the summer of 2007 the broken stone of Sarah Moon was repaired and reset on a new base, on the north side of her mother Louisa's stone in row 9; in late summer 2008 the remaining stones were reset at Lakeville Cemetery. The recovered list names, among others: Electa, daughter of S. & M. A. Cotton, died 24 September 1854, aged 3 months, reset north of her sister Martha's stone in row 11; Harriet Eldred, died 27 October 1854, aged 1 year 11 days, reset north of her mother Sabra's stone in row 15; Sarah A., daughter of E. & Louisa Moon; Catherine, wife of a Roush, died 20 February in a year in the 1870s whose last digit the broken stone no longer carries; Mary A., daughter of J. G. & C. Roush, part of a double stone whose other name is missing; and an unmatched foot-marker, "R. E. B.," placed in row 11 between the Bunch and Cotton stones. So burials with 1854 death dates stand in this ground on stones whose belonging was the chairman's recognition — the stones were found displaced and reset beside kin by inference, and their original positions are not proven. The 1854 dates evidence a ground receiving marked burials by 1854 at the strength of that account; they do not date the founding, and no earlier stone for this ground was carried by any carrier read. The reading state is the ground's strength: the genealogical society's own quarterly directs, in terms, "For a complete list of burials at Lakeville Cemetery, see St. Joseph County Indiana Cemetery Inscriptions Vol. 4" — the Society's complete-list claim, printed as the Society's, not verified against the volume — and the WPA register's eight pages of 1939 stand behind it, with an aggregator index of 705 records evidencing the modern reading's size at index strength only.
One question about the site is printed as a question, not a claim. Chapman places the township's first church — the Methodists' hewed-log building of 1843 — "on section 34, one mile north of Lakeville," and this cemetery's point stands about a mile north of the town centre. No carrier read ties the cemetery to the log-church site, names a burial at that site, or places a cemetery in Section 34 by description; whether the town cemetery grew up at or near the first church's ground is an open gap, its settlers the WPA history, the inscription volume's headnote for this ground, and the founding deed. The log-church site's own burial test returns negative at the strength searched: no burials there are carried anywhere in this record.