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Before 1916 the place was not Roseland. The town's own code states it plainly: "Prior to the incorporation of Roseland as a town, the area now known as Roseland was a territory known as Roselawn." On 27 December 1915 a petition for incorporation was filed with the St. Joseph County Commissioners, and at the same time an affidavit changing the name Roselawn to Roseland was filed with the County Recorder. The vote on incorporation was taken in Fred Ullery's grocery store, and "on January 25, 1916, the territory was incorporated as the town of Roseland." The town as incorporated contained 348.7 acres and a population of 165. The incorporation is carried again at §10.18(C) of the code ("The town was incorporated in 1916").
What the record does not carry is the place's earlier course: no plat, no founder or developer, and no origin for either name — Roselawn or the 1915 change to Roseland — was reached in any Indiana carrier. The roses-plantation and developer's-wife stories that circulate under the name "Roseland" belong to other places of the name (the Chicago neighborhood; the Nebraska village platted in 1887; the New Jersey borough) and are expressly not imported here. The settlers for the missing course are named's note: the Recorder's plat books and the 1915 incorporation petition file itself, with the South Bend Tribune's 1915–16 coverage. A second open item rides with the incorporation figures: 348.7 acres is 0.545 square miles, against the modern Census area of 0.385 — no carrier reached explains a contraction, and the discrepancy is printed as a conflict in the note, with the Census Boundary and Annexation Survey change records as its settler.