The City Directories, Year by Year as Actually Used

1868 to 1987 — the owners-roster source map, with the series' holes stated

What it is: the directory series is this build's most-documented instrument: the Owners Roster leg reconstructed it volume by volume, and the Public Servants and Business Gaps legs then worked the same volumes desk by desk and heading by heading. The series as used: the 1868 Business Directory of St. Joseph County (Genealogy Trails transcription, read whole; sixty-six proprietor lines hand-paired) — whose "Bankers" heading carries Judson A. B. & Son, the entry that corrected the first business pass's pre-charter banking silence; the 1889 Directory of Indiana Manufacturers and Buyers' Guide (Genealogy Trails transcription; twenty-one entries, the roster transcribed in full); Johnson's Business & Professional Directory 1902–03, with its own Mishawaka business directory (forty-six raw pairs) and Clark & Whitson, bankers, beside the new First National; Polk's Indiana Gazetteer and Business Directory 1916–17 (the Mishawaka entry, pp. 846–848) and the 1880–81 and 1884–85 gazetteers; and the Polk city directories: 1921, 1949, 1956, 1963, and the combined alphabets of 1971, 1976 and 1987. Farr's 1883 directory was tested and stands as a documented gap year: it has no Mishawaka department — all twenty-eight of its "mishawaka" hits are South Bend street names and residences.

Its standing, from this build's experience: the 1921 volume is a recovery in its own right: the archive.org scan polksouthbendind00polk binds two directories — Polk's South Bend of 1921 and a standalone Polk's Mishawaka City Directory 1921 — and the two city builds' 1921 layers are therefore complementary, not overlapping, a divergence from the South Bend roster's note that this build logs rather than smooths. 869–1028) were read whole. In the combined alphabets of 1971–87, firm entries were taken only on Mishawaka evidence — the "(M)" marker, a printed "(Mishawaka," or the ZIPs 46544/46545 — raw yields fifty-eight, fifty and forty-one pairs; the stricter person-form rule yielded zero usable pairs, stated in the fragment.

Where it fails: in its scans and its span. The 1921 scan's final classified leaves (S–Z) do not survive — the text jumps from "Savings Banks" past a WITHDRAWN-stamped leaf. The 1949 scan is poor, with column interleave; legible names only, the caveat printed in the entries. The 1956 classified's machine text is two-column interleaved — the noisiest trade assignment of any source in this build. The 1963 volume has no separate Mishawaka classified at all — alphabetical only, the gap stated. And the series' holes stand stated in the roster itself: 1869–1888 (the 1889 list and the founding layer only); 1904–1920 bracketed and uncovered between; 1922–1948 the hard gap, the whole block resting on the single 1949 canvass; after 1987 no volume reached in full text, and the block prints empty. The settling sources are named: the Polk South Bend volumes of those years (HathiTrust holds years, not in bulk-readable form) and the Allen County and Mishawaka libraries' copies; the pre-1921 depth — the 1908 Hibbard Mishawaka directory, the separate Mishawaka Polk volumes of 1929 and 1945–46 — stands behind the subscription door, in the Catalog's Ancestry rows.

Sources:

2. The Pending Research Catalog's Mishawaka Ancestry rows — the 1908 Hibbard directory and the separate Mishawaka Polk volumes.