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Chapman (1880), pp. 680–681; Howard (1907) II, pp. 830–831; 1875 atlas footnote
The McCombs family is the township's longest thread into the town. Lambert McCombs and his wife Hannah (Hague) McCombs, natives of Pennsylvania, "came to this county July 5, 1829" — Chapman gives the day — first settling in German Township "for a short time and then came to this tp."; Howard's biographical volume says the family arrived in Clay Township "about 1827," and the pair of dates stands unmerged in the pass note (C11). Their son William McCombs, born in Wayne County, Ohio, in 1818, married Eva Cripe in 1839 — knitting the two first-settler families together in the settlement's first decade — raised nine children, all living in 1880, and held 247 acres at $60 the acre as "farmer and stock raiser" on Section 26. Lambert senior "drove one of the first bolts into the first boat that went up the St. Joseph river" and died in California; the family homestead was known in the next century as the Sam Pearley place. William's son Lambert McCombs (the younger) has the volume's own sketch: log-cabin schools, Notre Dame, the Northern Indiana Normal at Valparaiso; enlisted in the fall of 1863 at twenty in the 21st Light Artillery and was wounded at Franklin, Tennessee; married Caroline Johnson, daughter of Joshua C. Johnson, "one of the early pioneers of Clay township," in 1866; farmed eighty acres for twenty-one years and retired to South Bend in 1892. The surname's line runs all the way down the record to the town itself: an Elizabeth J. McCombs was the town's council president in 2008 and 2010–2011, lost the clerk-treasurer's race in 2023, and held the council seat that stood for election in 2026. Whether she descends from the Section 26 family no carrier reached states, and the descent is not printed — the name's endurance on this ground, 1829 to the present council, is the fact the record carries.