The Published-Figure Rule, Stated and Applied (L17·2)

As of November 2026

The rule. Every figure in this section is a figure somebody published: an estate valuation printed in a probate notice, a figure a county history's sketch-writer set down, a directory's line, an assessment. No figure is estimated, interpolated, converted silently, or inferred from acreage. Where two published figures conflict, both print. Where no figure was published, the absence prints. Acreage is land, not money, and is never restated as money.

The audit, sketch by sketch. Laidlaw: passes with conflict — Chapman's $175 start and 610 acres, Howard's $50 and 580 acres; both published, both printed, neither preferred (the 1875 atlas biography sides with Chapman on arrival and family, which is noted, not used to amend Howard's figures). McKnight: passes — roughly 600 acres entered, per Chapman; no dollar figure was published for McKnight, and none appears in this section. Plumb: passes — $2,000 stock, Chapman p. 834, a stock figure printed as a stock figure. Crooks: passes — 200 acres with a "$1,200 barn and a $2,000 house," Chapman p. 807, the only published house-cost figure in the sketches. Ritter: passes — 116 acres "at $100 the acre," a published per-acre price printed as such, not multiplied into a valuation. Minnick: passes — wages published ($7 by the month, 50 cents on harvest days) against holdings (170 acres, 60 given to a son); wages and acres print in their own kinds. The Moon households: pass as four separate households, never merged — William (200 acres, d. November 3, 1857), George E. (240 acres; the creamery presidency), Solomon (whose dates conflict between Chapman and Howard — married June 26, 1861 and died December 25, 1872 in Chapman; married June 26, 1851 and died at 53, about 1878, in Howard — printed whole), Nelson (175 acres, section 6). Crofoot: passes with conflict — 240 acres in Chapman, 288 in Howard. Fulmer: passes with conflict — 135 acres in Chapman; 160, formerly 320, in Howard. Rogers: passes with note — homestead 80 grown to 320 acres in Howard, Chapman differing. Bancroft: passes with a four-way conflict carried whole — Zelotes born October 23, 1831 in Chapman, 1830 in Goodspeed (1893); Goodspeed makes Zelotes first settler, purchasing the original sawmill and 160 acres, with William building the 1856 mill on nearly 300 acres "on a part of which Osceola is now built"; the 1875 directory gives a settlement year of 1834. No net-worth figure for any Bancroft was published in the record reached, and none is printed. Henricks: boundary only — organizer of the First National Bank of South Bend (opened November 30, 1863), its president from 1869; a South Bend seat, excluded from this ground's sums.

What the audit found. The banked sketches comply: every dollar figure in them traces to a named published source, and the two systematic risks of the genre — vanity-history inflation and the merging of conflicting accounts — are handled by printing conflicts whole. The rule's cost is also printed: most fortunes in this section can be sized only in acres, and the leg says so rather than converting.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), pp. 807, 822, 827–828, 834; Howard (1907), vol. 2, pp. 927–928 and the Moon, Crofoot, Fulmer, Rogers sketches; Goodspeed (1893); 1875 county atlas and directory — all, Businesses, Farms & Agriculture.