The Terre Coupee parish ground: a tested question

1884–present

A Polish parish seated since 1884, with a school, a rectory, a hall and a grotto, would ordinarily keep a burying ground of its own — and for St. Stanislaus Kostka at Terre Coupee, no record read for this build attests one. The test is printed at its true strength, because the parish's own telling is thorough about land. The parish history, read whole and first-hand for the Religion section and re-read for this one, accounts for the parish's ground parcel by parcel: the Mackowski donation of 1884, deeded to Bishop Dwenger on 12 September 1884 for one dollar, on which church and school rose; the purchase of 25 March 1889, one and a half acres from Jacob and Antoine Mackowski for 187.50 dollars, on which the rectory was built; the hall ground of 1963, donated by Ted and Helen Mackowski. Buildings, prices, donors, dates — and no cemetery, in a history that forgets nothing else about the parish's acres. That silence is evidence of the search's strength, not proof of the ground's absence: a parish's dead may lie in the town's ground, in South Bend's Polish grounds, or in a small parish plot its own history never itemized, and this section does not choose among those on silence.

The want is banked as GAP-NC6-CEM-4. Its settlers are the parish office's own burial and lot records, if they exist; the Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend's parish file; the DAR inscription volumes for the township's southeast; and the state cemetery registry. Stanislaus Cemetery" transcription circulating on a Michigan genealogy site is Bay County, Michigan's ground; the section-map PDFs naming a Saint Stanislaus Kostka Cemetery on Orchard Street, Route 116, are Adams, Massachusetts; and the St. Stanislaus Cemetery at 1015 Greenwood Avenue is Michigan City's parish ground in LaPorte County, dug in that city's own right elsewhere and kept apart here under the Religion section's standing discipline. Terre Coupee's parishioners are buried somewhere, in ground their descendants can name; the record read for this build has not named it yet, and the question stands open at full size rather than answered at none.

Sources

1. St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish, New Carlisle, parish history page (ststansnewcarlisle.org/parish-history) — read whole, first-hand: the parish's land account, in which no cemetery appears.
2. INGenWeb, St. Stanislaus Cemetery, Michigan City, LaPorte County — the excluded namesake, identified and kept apart.
3. MiGenWeb, St. Stanislaus Cemetery transcription (Bay County, Michigan), and the eCatholic section maps for St. Stanislaus Kostka, Adams, Massachusetts — the excluded namesakes.
4. This build's Churches & Religion (article nc-rel-st-stanislaus) — the parish's course, whose land record this article applies.