The Civil War dead: one named man, and the limits of the county roll

Chapman (1880), Roll of Honor, pp. 444–448, read whole; Howard (1907) I, pp. 731–735; Goodspeed (1893), p. 234

Jacob H. Kiefer is the township's named Civil War dead. The eldest son of John and Elizabeth (Protsman) Kiefer of Clay Township, he "enlisted in Company D, Eighty-seventh Indiana Volunteer Infantry in 1862," served in all his regiment's engagements, was taken prisoner, and died at Andersonville of starvation and exposure. The carrier is Goodspeed (1893), in the sketch of his brother G. Frank Kiefer on the old Clay homestead (p. 234) — one book, at biography strength, and the only named Clay Township Civil War dead man in Chapman, Howard, or Goodspeed. His resting place is not stated by any carrier reached; the prison dead of Andersonville rest in the ground the prison record keeps, and Terrell's roster for Company D, 87th Indiana, with the Andersonville records, is his settler (G-WAR-2).

No township dead count can be built from the county's own roll, and the reason is the roll's form. Chapman's Roll of Honor (pp. 444–448) was read whole: every entry gives a name and a fate — killed, died of wounds, died — and nothing else; no residence, no township, no regiment, no company appears in any entry. County-wide the roll stands counted by a sibling pass at 231 printed entries and 230 distinct men; at township level it attributes no one. Names on it that a Clay reader will want to claim must not be claimed on this evidence: William H. Bulla (died 15 October 1863, of wounds) is not T. P. Bulla's named son — Chapman names that son William D. Bulla; Phineas E. Jennings (died 8 January 1863, of Stone River wounds) belongs to Penn Township's roll in Howard, not to Samuel Jennings's Clay family. Howard's own "Roll of Honor" (pp. 731–735) is a different instrument — a burial roll, soldiers of all wars interred in county cemeteries, arranged by cemetery — and what it gives this ground stands in the cemeteries file, where three soldiers sleep under the Ullery heading. Howard gives dedicated soldier-dead sections to Olive and Penn Townships and none to Clay; that asymmetry is itself part of the record, and this section prints it rather than repairing it.