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Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1880 — 986 pages
What it is: History of St. Joseph County, Indiana; Together with Sketches of Its Cities, Villages and Townships, Educational, Religious, Civil, Military, and Political History; Portraits of Prominent Persons, and Biographies of Representative Citizens — History of Indiana, published by Chas. C. Chapman & Co. of Chicago in 1880 and printed by Blakely, Brown & Marsh of Chicago. It is the first full history of the county and the base layer under nearly every nineteenth-century file in this history: the courts chapter (chapter V), the "Dark Deeds" chapter (chapter XVI, pp. 586–592), the river chapter that follows it ("St. Joseph River and Its Victims," pp. 592–600), and the church chapters near the end of the volume (pp. 880–886) were all read first-hand for the Crime, Unsolved Mysteries and Religion sections.
Its standing, from this build's experience: Chapman was a subscription house, and the volume is two books bound as one. The second of them — the History of Indiana portion — is the publisher's template matter, carried from county volume to county volume: the "Pioneer Life" chapters (Wolf Hunts, p. 157; Bee-Hunting, p. 158; Prairie Fires, p. 152) stand at identical pagination in Chapman's Elkhart County volume, which is how the Folklore leg caught them. They are Indiana's stock, not this county's record, and nothing in this history rests on them. The county's own matter is a different grade of goods: names, dates, court terms and church organizations recorded within living memory of the events, and the only connected account of the county's first fifty years that exists. Where Chapman is the sole carrier of a fact, this history prints him as the carrier, not as the verdict.
Where it fails: in the copies this build could reach, it fails mechanically. The online text the legs read is a transcription hosted by a genealogy site of the scan held by the Internet Archive — the transcription carries its host's own warning that the text was generated by artificial intelligence and may contain errors; the page images live on archive.org under the item historyofstjosep00chap, in the copy stamped by the Genealogy Collection of the Allen County Public Library. The scan text of the courts chapter (pp. 374–378) arrived disordered, and the township-products table in chapter XIII is unusable in machine text altogether. Both are on the pull list: the page images, not another transcription, are the settling read.
Sources:
- Title page and imprint of the 1880 volume, read from the Allen County Public Library copy's scan (Internet Archive, item historyofstjosep00chap).
- south-bend-full/.
- The transcription host's own notice (ldsgenealogy.com) that its text is AI-generated and the page images are on archive.org.