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The frame is a single book and a single year: Howard's History of St. Joseph County (1907), volume 2, the biographical volume, swept whole for the memberships it prints for Walkerton men, and assembled here as the town's dated club census. The count, at the book's own strength: three bodies, at least five membership instances, two men named. The bodies: Walkerton Lodge No. 619, F.&A.M. (the Masons); Castle Hall Lodge No. 263, Knights of Pythias; and the Jesse Coppie Post, Grand Army of the Republic. The named members: B. E. Williams, who held the census's fullest hand — a Mason of Lodge 619 and a Knight of Pythias who "has filled all of the chairs in the subordinate lodge and has several times been a delegate to the grand lodge" — and William A. Endley, likewise of both orders, treasurer of the Knights of Pythias lodge. A third membership stands in the volume unnamed in the record reached: a Walkerton veteran's biography carrying the Jesse Coppie Post of the G.A.R., the post named for a Coppie of the town's own soldier generation.
What the census is, and is not: it is a census of the memberships a county history chose to print, not a roll of the lodges — no lodge's full membership is numbered anywhere in the record reached, and no count of members per body is claimed. But the 1907 frame is these three: in the year of Howard's history, a Walkerton man of standing held his memberships in the Masonic lodge, the Pythian castle hall, and — if he had worn the uniform — the Grand Army post, and the histories that praised him printed those memberships as part of the praise. That is the census, counted as far as the source counts.
Sources: Howard (1907), History of St. Joseph County, vol. 2, biographical sketches of B. E. Williams and William A.