The Lincoln men, named: the standard, and what does not yet meet it

1861 – 1865

The standard: in the sister builds, a township's Civil War men are named where two records meet — a county-history biography or sketch that ties the man to the ground, and the man's company in Howard's printed rosters. Osceola's pass, working Penn Township, found five men who survive that double test, because Chapman prints a deep bench of Penn biographies. For this ground the bench was not reached: Chapman's Lincoln Township chapter and biographies — the sketches of the Fulmers, the Rupels, the settlers of 1835 — stand in the closing register as the first settler, and until they are read, this section names no Lincoln man on a single record's say-so. What follows is everything the records reached do carry, each at its own strength, and none of it promoted past that strength.

The Grand Army's own trail: the town's veterans organized as Jesse Coppock Post No. 378 of the Grand Army of the Republic — the post article below — and a post is itself a roster that once existed: its charter members and its descriptive book named Lincoln Township's Union veterans man by man. Those post records, in the state Grand Army collection, are the second settler. The county veterans index, which carries Grand Army rows with company and regiment for men across the county, was swept across the letters H, L, M, R, S and W: its Grand Army rows in those letters are attributed to Mishawaka City, South Bend, and the other townships — no row in the letters read carries a Lincoln Township or Walkerton attribution. The C page, where a Coppock row would stand, refused the fetch and was not retried; the sweep is printed at its partial strength and the whole index is the third settler.

Two burial leads, printed as leads: the Veterans Affairs burial record, as transcribed, places two men of Civil War age in Woodlawn Cemetery at Walkerton with United States Army stones: John Schwartz, born 1 November 1838, died 4 January 1922; and Joseph Stevenson, born 8 October 1836, died 11 October 1908, at the Woodlawn on Ohio Street. Neither transcription states a war. A man born in 1836 or 1838 was of prime service age in 1861–65, and burial under a government stone in the town's cemetery is exactly the kind of record the county's graves registration worked from — but age and a stone are not a service record, and neither man is entered anywhere in this section as a Civil War soldier. Their compiled service records, and the South Bend Area Genealogical Society's graves registration for Woodlawn, are the settlers that would decide them.

The finding, stated plainly: at the double-record standard, the Civil War's Lincoln Township roll stands at zero names proved — not because the town sent no one (a railroad town full of settler families of military age, in a county that sent two thousand, sent its share as a matter of near-certainty), but because the records that name them township by township have not yet been read for this ground. The roll is carried as a named gap with five named settlers, in the closing register, items 1–5. this section prints the gap rather than a borrowed name; the county's dead are counted whole in the next article, where they belong.

Sources:

1. Howard, Ch. XIV §3, pp. 743–745 — the post list that seats Coppock Post No. 378 at Walkerton (the post article below).
2. St. Joseph County veterans index — letters H, L, M, R, S, W read whole; the Grand Army rows as found, none under a Lincoln or Walkerton attribution; C page refused.
3. Veterans Affairs burial records as transcribed (Interment.net, Indiana veterans burials) — the Schwartz and Stevenson lines at Woodlawn, Walkerton, printed as leads.