About The Standard

My wife Katelynne was born and raised in Fort Wayne and went to Snider. I grew up in New Jersey. We met in Chicago.

We live in Wolcottville now, about forty minutes north, where we publish the LaGrange County Gazette.

This one is here because Fort Wayne is where she is from, and because it is where our children's family is from.

I am secretary of the Fort Wayne chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, and I built its website. The chapter and this publication cover the same period, and this site links to it, so it is stated here rather than left for somebody to find.

The Fort Wayne Standard is published by Indian Lakes Marketing, the same company that publishes the Gazette and the same company that runs a marketing business. 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, before you read anything else. Money does not change what a piece says or whether it runs, and profiles are free. There are no advertisements on either paper and there never will be.

The same applies to anything else this company built. An organisation's site, a town site, a resource listing: it carries the disclosure or it is not linked from here. Which one it is gets checked before the link goes in, rather than assumed.

A paper called the Fort Wayne Standard published here from June 1854. The Sentinel, which was the paper across town and disagreed with it, called it the organ of the abolition wing. When it stopped in 1856 the Sentinel said so, and said it was opposed to its editor's views and credited him with zeal and honesty in advocating them.

That is the whole of what this page says about it. The rest, including what the Sentinel printed word for word and what happened to the man who ran it, is in the piece about how it ended.

This paper shares that one's name and is not a continuation of it, or of any other paper called the Standard, here or anywhere else.

A record of Fort Wayne and Allen County. Mostly history, because that is what the sources hold.

Every date, name and figure that reaches a piece is read off the page image, not off a search result and not off somebody's transcription. Scanned text turns plausible words into other plausible words, and nobody can see the error until they open the page.

Where two sources disagree, the piece says so and does not pick. Where a claim rests on one source, it says that. A later book repeating an earlier one is not a second source, and where that is what has happened the piece says which book is doing the repeating.

Where somebody's memory is the only record, it runs as memory, which is a real kind of evidence and deserves to be labelled honestly rather than dressed up as a document.

What a piece cannot say goes in the piece, not in a note nobody reads. Several of the pieces here end by saying what the record does not give.

Corrections are public and dated, on the piece, saying what it said before. Nothing is quietly edited.

Sources are listed at the foot of every piece with the page and the scan leaf, so you can go and look. The sources page says where the material comes from and how it is handled.

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

It is not neutral about Fort Wayne. My wife is from here and our children's family is here. That is why this exists and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

It is not finished. Twenty townships, a city, six sections, and most of the record still unread.

Most of what is missing from this archive is in somebody's head, or in a box in somebody's attic, or in a county record nobody has opened since it was written.

There are forms for sending things in, including corrections, at the submission page.