Fred Ullery — the grocer of the founding vote

Town Code §11.01(B), the town's own record; the negative register as searched, Pass R-2

Fred Ullery is the one person the town's own founding record names, and he is named for one fact: "Voting on these issues took place in a grocery store owned by Fred Ullery" — the issues being the incorporation petition and the name-change affidavit, the vote in December 1915 or January 1916, the store the territory's polling place. Beyond that sentence, the record reached in two passes holds nothing of him: he appears in no county history (all predate the vote), in no grave-registration list or census index reached for the county, and in no other carrier searched; the 1927 businesses the town code lists — "a lumber company, a grocery and meat market and garages" — name no proprietor, and it is not stated that the grocery of 1927 was his. One later namesake stands in the South Bend record — a Fred Ullery of East Ireland Road, appearing in that city's public-works minutes of December 1980 — and nothing identifies him with the grocer of 1915; the two are not merged. His identity — his dates, his family, and his connection, if any, to the Ulery settlers of 1834 or to the German Township Ullerys — stands as a named gap (G-PP-1), its settlers the 1910 and 1920 census schedules for Clay Township, the county directories of the 1910s, and the incorporation file itself. He prints here at exactly his record's size: a grocer whose store was, for one winter vote, the town hall of a town that did not yet exist.