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The method first, because here the method is the finding's limit: this item directs a by-name search — the patent record searched for the town's Black residents of the patent era, the names to come from the banked population record. The banked population record carries no such names. It carries counts — Black residents of the town numbered eleven in 2000, nine in 2010, twenty in 2020, in the census lines the Population leg prints — and no banked fragment of this build names an individual Black resident of Walkerton in any era, patent era or other. The by-name search therefore has no name list to run, and this article does not invent one. What could be run was run: the patent record for Walkerton-resident inventors, built person by person in this section from the patent documents themselves, surfaces three inventors — Shobert, Hartsough, Fogle — each documented in the county-history and corporate record; no fourth resident inventor of any description surfaced in the record reached, and no patent in the town's record is attributable, on any evidence reached, to a Black inventor.
Printed as an honest negative at exactly that strength: the search was structurally thinner than its design — counts without names cannot be cross-run against a patent index — and its settler is named for the pass that can close it: the manuscript census schedules for Lincoln Township, 1900–1940, which name every resident, read for the town's Black households of the patent era and cross-run against the patent indexes by name. Until that read is made, the negative stands as searched-and-not-found, at the strength stated, and no stronger claim in either direction is printed.
patent documents, read November 2026).