The records of Woodlawn: the 1939 registration, the federal name-forms, and the aggregator layer

1939–2026

Woodlawn's dead are recorded in four layers, and this article keeps them in their order of authority. The registration layer is the 1939 WPA graves registration, keyed by the South Bend Area Genealogical Society as North Woodlawn (Walkerton), pages 1109–1125, and South Woodlawn (Walkerton), pages 1126–1139 — the only Walkerton-seated keys in the county list. The archival original sits in the University of Notre Dame Archives' Saint Joseph County Records, a WPA 1939 listing of male burials running "Porter Cemetery to Woodlawn South and North," with typescript cemetery histories and directions: the registration is where a first-hand reading of Woodlawn's early burials begins, and the typescript history in that collection is the named settler for the ground's pre-1926 founding gap. The DAR's Schuyler Colfax Chapter cemetery volumes for the county exist in full text, but their optical character recognition is severely garbled and no Woodlawn passage could be extracted; the volumes are cited for their existence and for nothing specific, and no burial is attributed to a DAR reading from this build. A transcription of the ground exists on the INGenWeb county project — names were added to "Woodlawn – Walkerton" in April 2006 — cited as a pointer to where the transcription lives.

The federal layer is the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs burial data, read here through Interment.net's republication (compiled 17 April 2025 from VA data of 16 December 2022) — official record as to the burials, with the cemetery-name spellings the federal record's own. The VA data files Walkerton-area burials under five name forms: WOODLAWN CEMETERY; WALKERTON WOODLAWN CEMETERY; SOUTH WOODLAWN CEMTERY [sic]; NORTH WOOD LAWN [sic]; and the postal seatings under MORRIS and STRATTON treated in the boundary article. Under the four Woodlawn forms, twenty-seven entries surfaced's search of the transcription — Civil War soldiers of the 1860s generation (including one Confederate States Army private, Levi T. Grim, 1825–1892), Spanish-American War men who served in the Moro Province, and burials running to 2019 — printed as entries surfaced, with this section's own caveat carried whole: the list is every Walkerton-46574 entry found through the search-indexed pages of a 78,614-record transcription, not a verified exhaustive scrape, and is never printed as "all veterans buried at Walkerton." The veterans' rolls themselves belong to this build's Wars leg; this section carries the federal data only as cemetery evidence. The ground's one monument is documentary: the World War II memorial, erected in 1947 by the Mothers of World War II, Walkerton Unit 140, inscribed "In Memory of the Valiant Sons, and Daughters, of This Area, Who Served Their Country in the Armed Services in World War II" — a memorial standing in the south section, not documented as a separate soldiers' section, and no designated veterans' section is claimed for the ground. The aggregator layer prints last and at its own strength: Find a Grave indexes individual Woodlawn memorials (Samuel Mull, 1836–1901, Memorial #307009351, whose profile seats him at "Woodlawn Cemetery in Walkerton, Lincoln Township, St. Joseph County, Indiana"), but no Find a Grave cemetery ID or memorial count for the ground was successfully retrieved, and none is invented.

Sources

1. SBAGS, Graves Registration Project Cemetery Keys (North Woodlawn 1109–1125; South Woodlawn 1126–1139).
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, Saint Joseph County (Ind.) Records (SJO) — WPA 1939 listing and typescript cemetery histories — pointer strength.
3. INGenWeb, St. Joseph County updates page (Woodlawn – Walkerton names added April 2006) — pointer strength.
4. DAR, Schuyler Colfax Chapter, St. Joseph County, Indiana Cemetery Records, vols. (Archive.org full text) — existence only; OCR caveat as printed.
5. Interment.net, Veterans Buried in Indiana Cemeteries (VA data, 16 December 2022; compiled 17 April 2025) — official record (federal) for the burial data; name spellings as in the federal record.
6. HMdb, Walkerton World War II Memorial (marker 75605), inscription and siting.