What this rests on

On 1 October 2026 we read every piece then published here, sixty-eight of them, against the sources each one cites. We corrected six and updated one.

In fifty-seven of the sixty-eight pieces we found at least one sentence, in our own words, that rests on a book written decades later and cites no record made at the time. There are 338 such sentences. Fifty-three of them already named the book, two named it for part of the claim, and 283 did not.

Sixty-six of the 338 are sentences where the reader could not tell, from the piece's own list of sources, whether anything made at the time stood behind the claim. We counted them in.

Five more sit inside quotation, where a compiler's words are printed as his. That is a different thing. A quotation tells the reader whose claim it is. A sentence in our own voice does not, unless it says so.

Eleven pieces had no such sentence:

LaGrange County was organized in 1832. Its first newspaper, the La Grange Freeman, began at Ontario in July 1842, ten years later. Writing in 1882, Battey said the few copies of the early papers still kept were "almost destitute of local references." The first paper that lasted, the LaGrange Standard, began in December 1856.

For the county's first decades, the sustained accounts are two books written long afterward: the county history of 1882, which this site calls Battey, and the history of 1920, which it calls Ford, together with the chronology in the county atlas of 1893, which Ford reprinted. Resting on them is the state of the record. What we did wrong was rest on them without saying so.

The two books do not always agree with each other, or with themselves.

Ford gives the year a private bank in Shipshewana was organized as 1889 in one volume and 1890 in the other.

Ford gives the town of LaGrange 1,708 people in 1900. The census he is repeating counted 1,703.

In one chapter, Battey says the county's first post office opened in 1832 at a farmhouse on Mongoquinong Prairie, with George Egnew as postmaster. In another, he says that when an office called Mongoquinong was established at Lima, Judge Seeley was appointed to it. He does not say whether these were one office or two.

Ford says John Longyear was the first postmaster at Marseilles. Battey says Joseph Scott had the office before him. The federal Official Registers name Luke Diggins in 1847 and John Diggins in 1849. Three sources give three answers, and only one of them was printed while it was happening.

Where a claim rests on a later book and no record made at the time, the sentence that makes the claim names the book. We may rest on Battey for anything Battey is the only witness to. We may not let a reader mistake Battey for a record.

Of the 338 sentences, 53 already name the book they rest on. The other 285 do not, or name it for only part of the claim, and they are still on this site as they were written. We are going through them piece by piece and adding the attribution. The sources were always listed at the foot of each piece, so this is editing rather than correction, and those sentences carry no correction block. Until it is finished, a reader may find a sentence here that rests on Battey or Ford without saying so. That is the work in progress, not the standard.

The federal government printed an Official Register of its officers every other year. Its post office lists name each office's postmaster, and from at least 1843 its county. There are twenty editions from 1833, the first after the county was organized, to 1871. Six of them come before about 1844, where the Post Office Department's own register of appointments for this county begins. The editions of 1847 to 1853 settled Marseilles, and those of 1847 and 1849 settled Pashan.

The pieces on this site, and the check described on this page, are researched, drafted and checked with an AI model, Claude, made by Anthropic, working from the page images and texts each piece cites. A person rules on every piece and every correction before it is published.

Both kinds of sentence are on this site. If a sentence names Battey or Ford, it rests on a book written decades after the fact, from what its writers could find and what people remembered. If it names an appointment register, a census volume, a plat, an Official Register or a county filing, it rests on a document made at the time. From now on the sentence says which.