About the Gazette

My wife Katelynne's grandparents have had a place on Westler Lake since the seventies. She grew up in Fort Wayne and spent her summers out here, which is what people from the city did and still do.

I grew up in New Jersey. We met in Chicago, and in 2016 she brought me out to her grandmother's on the lake. I proposed to her there.

After 2020 we looked hard at where we wanted to raise our children and we chose LaGrange County, which only one of us has any claim to.

Then I started trying to tell them where they live, and I found out how hard that is.

The county's history is not lost. It is scattered. Two county histories printed in 1882 and 1920, both public domain, both free on the internet, both nearly unreadable as scans. Fire insurance maps in the Library of Congress that nobody has read since the surveyors drew them. A marker at the corner of Main and Morton in Shipshewana that records something neither county history mentions. Things people know and have not written down.

None of it is hidden. It is just work, and nobody had done the work.

So I started doing it. If you are also from somewhere else, or your family has been here two hundred years and nobody wrote any of it down, this is for you either way.

I belong to the Sons of the American Revolution, which means somebody in my family kept a record long enough for me to trace it. That is the whole of what a hereditary society is: proof that a piece of paper survived.

I also sit on the boards of the Wolcottville Community Initiative and the Westler Lake Association, which is the same instinct as this. A country keeps its history or it loses it, and the same is true of a county, and a county has fewer people watching.

A record of LaGrange County, Indiana. Mostly history, because that is what the sources hold.

Every piece here traces to something a person can go and look at. Where two sources disagree, the piece says so and does not pick. Where something rests on one source, it says that too. Where somebody's memory is the only record, that gets published as memory, which is a real kind of evidence and deserves to be labelled honestly rather than dressed up as a document.

There is a page explaining where the material comes from, and every piece links to it.

Corrections are public and dated. We do not quietly edit something and pretend it always said that.

It is not a newspaper. Nobody here covers meetings or breaking news, and the county's existing papers do that.

It is not neutral about the county. I chose to live here and my children are growing up here. That is the reason this exists and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

It is not finished. Eleven townships, four sections, and a great deal of the record still unread.

The Gazette is published by Indian Lakes Marketing, the company Katelynne and I run in Wolcottville. It is the same business, not a separate one, and some of the businesses written about here are or have been its clients.

Where that is true, the piece says so at the top. Money does not change what a piece says or whether it runs, and listings and profiles are free, and always will be.

Most of what is missing from this archive is in somebody's head or in a box in somebody's attic.

There are forms for sending things in, and there is a page about the other ways to help.