Making Sense of the Census Records - or Not:

William Calvin Cheatham, part 2

So now let's look at the census records and see what they say.
(Hint: If you can click on a subheading, doing so will take you to the page where you can download and/or view the document larger.  If an image does not have a linked subheading, clicking on the image will allow you to do the same thing.  Assuming, that is, that I set everything up correctly!)

The earliest census in which W. C. Cheatham shows up is 1860.

William Calvin Cheatham  

U. S. Federal Census 1860

Cherokee County, Texas

(You can download a blank form to see the questions asked here.)

I know, this is very hard to read. Even when you click on the image and view it larger, it is still hard to read. Sometimes they are just like that. (I guess the census takers couldn't be bothered to refill his pen with ink.) (Here's a hint: if you go to the Family Search website and create a free account, you can search through individual census records. So you could go to 1860 Census, Texas, Cherokee County, Beat 10. Their site, unlike Ancestry, allows you to adjust the picture quality for easier reading!) Anyway, here is a detail:

The family is shown on two separate pages. I don't know how the transcribers even read this. I would never have found this if I were searching through the records on my own. W. C.'s father is much easier to read:

So what can we learn from this document? Well,

In 1860, Wm C. was eight years old, meaning he was born around 1852.
He was born in Texas.

In 1860, the family was living in Cherokee County, Texas, in the area served by the Rusk post office.

He was attending school.

His father was a farmer, and there was another farmer living with his family.

He had a brother who was one year younger than him.  (Since the family history says he should also have an older brother, I am guessing that he passed away as a child.)

His father was farming and the family's land was valued at $600 (I think I'm reading this right), which is equivalent to just over $18,000 today.  (Do with that what you will.  I have no idea if this was rich or poor or average for Texas at the time.  Anyone?  I am sure, however, that it tells us that the family owned land, and were not tenant farmers or sharecroppers, so I guess not that poor.)

Hmmmm. Well, we're getting a little better picture here, right? So now I'm wondering, where is Cherokee County, and what was it like in Rusk?

See, there it is way over there on the right, which makes sense, because W. C.'s dad was born in Tennessee. Oh! It just dawned on me that the family history said that W. C. was born in Angelina County. If you look at the map again, you'll find it just southeast of Cherokee County. So the family didn't move too far then.

Now I'm wondering what life was like in Cherokee County, and Rusk in particular, in 1860. Here are some excerpts from the Texas State Historical Association website:

CHEROKEE COUNTY. Cherokee County is located in central East Texas, bordered on the north by Smith County, on the east by Rusk and Nacogdoches counties, on the south by Angelina County, and on the west by Anderson and Houston counties. It was named for the Cherokee Indians, who lived in the area before being expelled in 1839. 

Rapid settlement began in 1834. The Houston-Forbes treaty of February 23, 1836, seemingly assured Cherokee neutrality, but the rejection of the treaty by the Texas Senate and the increased encroachment of settlers on Indian land led to violence. On October 5, 1838, Indians massacred members of the Isaac Killough family at their farm northwest of the site of present Jacksonville. This led directly to the Cherokee War of 1839 and the expulsion of all Indians from the county. White settlers quickly occupied the abandoned Indian farms, and the communities of Pine Town, Lockranzie, Linwood, and Cook's Fort developed. Cherokee County was marked off from Nacogdoches County on April 11, 1846, and was organized on July 13 of that year, with the town of Rusk as the county seat. Only one family lived at Rusk then.

The county's settlers were mostly from the South and brought with them the economic and social traditions of that region. The 1850 population of 6,673 was the third largest in the state. By 1860 the population had grown to 12,098, of whom 3,250 were slaves, two were free blacks, and fourteen were Spanish surnamed. Of the white families, 29 percent owned slaves, although only thirty-two plantations had twenty or more slaves; seven slaveholders in the county owned more than forty slaves. Cotton was important to the local economy, and in 1860 local farmers produced 6,251 bales of the fiber. The area's principal crops, however, were corn and wheat. County farmers produced more than 496,000 bushels of corn in 1860, and about 21,000 bushels of wheat.

Cherokee County voters strongly supported secession, and twenty-four companies from the county entered Confederate service. The Confederate Army maintained two training camps, a prisoner of war camp, a large commissary depot, and conscription and field-transportation offices in the county. War demands allowed the development of two iron foundries and a gun factory.

                                                                                       
Okay, so, very Southern, then. As far as the town of Rusk goes, I had a surprisingly hard time finding anything.  I finally found something about it on the Texas State Historical Association website. Here are some excerpts:

RUSK, TEXAS. The town was established by an act of the Texas legislature on April 11, 1846, which defined the boundaries of Cherokee County and called for the county seat to be named for Gen. Thomas Jefferson Rusk, one of the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence. At the time only John Kilgore and his family lived on the site; but within two years most of the families in and around Cook's Fort had moved to the new town, and by 1850 Rusk reportedly had 355 residents. A post office was authorized on March 8, 1847, and the town's first church, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, was organized by Rev. J. B. Harris in May 2, 1847. The first Masonic Lodge in the county, Euclid Lodge 45, was chartered on July 15, 1848. 

Like many early Texas towns, Rusk was laid out on a grid pattern based on the Shelbyville plan with a courthouse square in the center. The county court originally met in a crude log dogtrot cabin, but in August 1847 a contract was let for a two-room frame building with brick chimneys. The town's first jail was built the same year, and a larger frame courthouse was erected in 1849. A larger jail was built in 1855, and a brick building to house the county and district clerk's offices was constructed on the northeast corner of the square in 1859; the latter structure stood until it was razed in 1941. Most of the town's early businesses were clustered around the courthouse square. A city charter was approved in 1850, and a second charter was adopted in 1856 when the town's first mayor, E. W. Bush, was elected. The town's first school was taught by the Presbyterian minister J. B. Harris; in 1848 Cherokee Academy, a private subscription school, was chartered; and in 1851 another private school, the Stephens and Carter Academy was established. The latter institution, housed in an impressive two-story structure on Henderson Street, eventually developed into the Rusk Male and Female Academy, which survived into the latter portion of the nineteenth century.

During the 1850s Rusk grew rapidly, swelled by immigrants from the old South and Europe, including the British Isles, Germany, and Norway, as well as a sizeable African-American population. The town's growth slowed during the Civil War and early post-war years but rebounded in the 1870s with the coming of the railroads.

Okay. So a typical frontier town.

Now let's find out what the 1870 Census can tell us . . . Unfortunately, I couldn't find him in the 1870 census. He would have been 18 years old at the time, so a young man. Maybe he was out on his own, or maybe the whole family had moved. Maybe they were in the process of moving when the census was taken. Who knows. All I do know is that the family history says that W. C. married his first wife, Amelia Virginia, in 1871, in Robertson County, Texas. I actually read through all of the pages of the 1870 census for Robertson County looking for either of the future newlyweds or their families and didn't find them.

Speaking of this marriage, I will have to say right now, that I wish I knew what sources were used for which bits of information in the family history. Did this date and place come from the family Bible? Oral history? Other documents? Here's my problem: the Ancestry.com website has two indexes of Texas Marriages. Both show a W. H. Cheatham marrying A. V. Blackshear on July 2, 1871. Neither index has images of the original documents to see if this is a transcription error. Who knows, maybe when he told the clerk his name was William Calvin, they heard William Halvin. I'm pretty familiar with Copperscript, the handwriting style of the time, and I don't know how anyone could mix up an H and a C when reading things. Maybe the indexes were compiled from lists, which were compiled from the original documents, providing more opportunities for mistakes to be made? There were actually several William Cheathams of around the same age in the same areas as ours, all cousins from what I can tell, because the Cheathams seem to have always been big on giving family names.

Anyway, I guess that means we have to move on to the 1880 census:

William Calvin Cheatham 

U. S. Federal Census 1880

Taylor County, Texas

(You can download a blank form to see the questions asked here.)

Here is a detail; it's a little easier to read than the last one:

Let's see what we can learn from this one:

In 1880, W. C. was 27 years old and living in Taylor County Texas.  (This matches the story that the family lived in Buffalo Gap.)

He was married to A. V., (Amelia Virginia), and had two children, a boy named C. D., age 2, and a girl named A. L., age 1.  (I'm assuming that C. D. is supposed to be A. D. and the census taker was hard of hearing or something - I haven't come across any other Armons so maybe he was unfamiliar with the name and thought he heard it wrong.  The same for the daughter, Erences - he must have thought it was 'Arences.'  Anyway, the ages match and the names mostly match, and they are in the right place at the right time, so it is probably safe to assume we have the right family here.)

It shows that both of his parents were born in Tennessee.  (This does not match the information in the family history, but the census records get this wrong more than you would think - sometimes reporting different places for several records in a row for people you have no doubt are your ancestor.  So I'm still going to say we have the right family, even with all the problems we're seeing.)

His occupation was stockraising.

He could read and write.

Okay. So now we know that he raised animals of some sort, I'm guessing cattle.

That didn't really add too much to the story, did it? Although I must say, I always love finding out what our ancestors reported as their occupation.

And here's our handy dandy map of Texas again, so we can see that Taylor county is further west, closer to the center of the state.

And another one showing Taylor County specifically:

There we see Buffalo Gap, right near the center, just south of Abilene. So what was the area like at the time? Here is a compilation of what the Texas State Historical Association website has to say about it: (Funny thing, I compiled the following information by cutting and pasting pieces together from two separate articles on the same website and it has some inconsistencies. I didn't care enough to try to track down the correct bit of information, but if you do, by all means, go right ahead!)

TAYLOR COUNTY. Taylor County is in west central Texas. In 1858 the Texas legislature established Taylor County, named for Alamo defenders Edward, James, and George Taylor, from lands formerly assigned to Bexar and Travis counties. Taylor County was attached to Travis and Bexar counties for judicial and administrative purposes until 1873, when these responsibilities were assigned to Eastland County. Partly due to the presence of Indians, the area remained largely unsettled.  The earliest group of European settlers in Taylor County were buffalo hunters and bone gatherers, who arrived during the 1870s.

As more people moved into the area, the county was organized in 1878, and Buffalo Gap, a small settlement near the center of the county, became the seat of government. The first general public election was held with eighty-seven voters. By 1880 Buffalo Gap had 1,200 people, a drugstore, a carriage and blacksmith shop, a big hotel, a jail, three or four grocery stores, and a saloon. In 1883 the cornerstone of Buffalo Gap College was laid, and documents pertaining to the times were sealed within the rock. Later, vandals tore out the stone and removed the contents. This Presbyterian college, the first formal attempt at higher education in Taylor County, opened in June 1885. Buffalo Gap called itself the "Athens of the West." 

By 1880 there were 917 people living in the area, and ranching completely dominated the local economy. Settlement accelerated when the Texas and Pacific Railway built through the area in the early 1880s. Buffalo Gap was bypassed by the railroad, which was routed instead to pass through the northern part of the county to the site of a new town, to be called Abilene. In 1881 the railroad connected the area to national markets and encouraged immigration. While Abilene began to develop into a shipping center, Buffalo Gap declined in population, and, after an election held in 1883, Abilene became the county seat. Attempts by the people of Buffalo Gap to challenge the election results by force of arms were quickly suppressed.  By 1884 Buffalo Gap had decreased in population to 600. Presbyterian, Methodist Episcopal, Baptist, and First Christian churches were established in the community, which also had a newspaper, sixteen businesses, and a high school. In 1890 the population had dropped to 300 and the number of businesses to seven. In 1892 Buffalo Gap had a population of 400, eleven businesses, Presbyterian and Methodist churches, and Buffalo Gap College. 

Though the climate and land of Taylor County were hostile to agriculture, hopeful farmers experimented with different crops in the 1870s and 1880s, cultivating peaches, corn, wheat, and cotton. The spread of crop cultivation led to disputes between the cattlemen who favored the open range and the new farmers who sought to fence in their crops. This fence-cutting war was on the brink of an armed exchange until the late 1880s, when the legislature passed new laws to regulate the sale, ownership, and fencing of land. By 1890 there were 587 farms and ranches in the county, encompassing 196,000 acres, and the population had increased to 6,957. 

Here is a picture I found online:

I think this all gives us a much better picture of what life was like for W. C., even if we don't know an awful lot of specifics about him.

Moving on . . . There are pretty much no 1890 census records because they were destroyed by a fire, so let's skip to the 1900 one:

William Calvin Cheatham 

U. S. Federal Census 1900 pg.1

Lincoln County, New Mexico

William Calvin Cheatham 

U. S. Federal Census 1900 pg. 2

Lincoln County, New Mexico

(You can download a blank form to see the questions asked here.)

Okay, so I know this is also hard to read. I couldn't figure out how to show three separate parts on two separate pages all at once, other than to snip screenshots and stick them together. Even if you click on the picture and then enlarge it in the new window, it just gets blurry. So I would suggest opening the link for the full forms and enlarging them in the window that pops up.

This census form is a bit more interesting than the last one. It tells us:

W. C. had moved his family to the town of Gray in Lincoln County, New Mexico.  (Getting closer to Arizona!)

He was born in January of 1853, and was 47 years old. (Hmmmm.  January is a new bit of info.  But didn't the family history say he was born in 1852?)

His father was born in Tennessee and his mother in South Carolina.  (This matches what our family history says.)

He was married to someone named "Lizzie." (At first guess one would think this was Amelia Virginia's nickname, but it says her father was born in Holland, which is way farther off than just listing the wrong state - someone's not likely to get that wrong.  Then we remember that the family history says that W. C.'s first wife died around 1885, so this must be his second wife, Mary Brookreson.) 

He had five children, all of whom could read and write except the youngest:       
     D., a son age 22, working as a day laborer
     Elmer, a son age 16, also working as a day laborer
     Shelton, a son age 12, attending school
     Lillie, a daughter age 11, also attending school
     Lee, a son age 8  (The census did not say he is attending school, nor that he could read and write, but it also didn't say whether he could speak English, so I guess the census taker was just slacking and forgot to fill his info in.)

His wife had had four children, only three of whom were still living.  (This accounts for the story that their son Early, born in 1893, did not survive.) 

W. C.'s father, E. C. was living with them.

They had four male boarders (all in their 20's) living with them, three of whom were coal miners and one a day laborer.

They rented their home, which was a house and not a farm.

W. C.'s occupation was a carpenter.  (At this point I'm going whaaaaaat? because before, he was a stockraiser.  Also, there was another Wm Cheatham back in the 1880 census who was living in Robertson County, Texas who was born in almost the same year who was a carpenter.  But his wife and kids were even more different than what was reported on the 1880 census we have chosen as being our ancestor.  So I guess we have the right guy in all of the records so far, but you can see why the census records sometimes leave as many questions as answers!) 

What we don't know is what year the family moved here, which means we don't know how long they stayed.

Here is a photograph of W. C. and his family (probably taken sometime around 1897 or 1898, because Calvin Malone is not in the photo, but Leonard doesn't look older than seven - if anyone can pin down an exact date, let me know!):

Standing: Shelton, Elmer, Armon D. (Dee), and Delila (Lila)
Seated: Edmond C., W. C., Leonard (Lee), and Mary.

Now, doesn't having a picture of him make you feel like you know him a bit more? Aside from seeing what he looked like, we can see that he is following the hair fashions for a man of his age of the time, and that the family is nicely dressed, so not poor, although the two younger kids are not wearing shoes, so probably not all that well off at the time, either. (Since this is obviously a formal portrait that they dressed up for, you would think they would have put on shoes if they had any that fit!) They all look pretty serious, but as we all know, that's what everyone looked like in those early photographs!

So here we go again with the maps. Personally, I think history makes a whole lot more sense if you can see exactly where things are happening. (If you don't agree, I guess you can just scroll right on past them!)

So there is Lincoln County in the middle. I have yet to find a website as nifty as the Texas Historical Association site, so I'm going to give you the best I could come up with about the county and town of Gray, and I'll update it if and when I find something better.

Excerpts from the Encyclopaedia Britannica about Lincoln County:

It is a rugged region with green hills and large plains surrounding and separating high mountain ranges. The town of Lincoln was settled in 1849 and became the county seat when Lincoln county was established in 1869; at that time Lincoln was the largest county in the United States, covering one-fourth of New Mexico. The town was the centre of the Lincoln County War (1878), fought between rival merchants for economic domination. It began with accusations of cattle rustling and escalated to murder and a five-day gun battle at the courthouse. The teen-aged killer Billy the Kid (William Bonney) figured prominently in the carnage, killing a sheriff and escaping from jail. Gold was discovered at White Oaks in 1879, leading to development of the county’s mineral resources.

Here is a map of the southwest portion of the county:

Yes, I know this map is horrible, but it is the only one I could find showing the towns that I'll be talking about! And here is all I could find on Gray (other than that it is a ghost town today).

From the AccessGenealogy website:

Gray (Capitan), New Mexico

On the SouthWest side of the Capitan Mountains in New Mexico sits the mountains namesake, the small town of Capitan, the home of “Smokey Bear”.....Capitan was actually known by a different name in it’s infancy. Seaborn T. Gray would take up residence in 1885 and begin mining the Capitan or Solado coal field. The town was known as “Gray” until 1899, when the Carrizo to Capitan spur of the EP & NE Railroad was built, after that point, the railroad changed the name of Gray to Capitan. The coal produced by the coal field was sold to the railroad until 1905 when that same spur which brought prosperity to the town was abandoned. From that point, coal produced by the mines was consumed locally.  One can imagine the political scene of Capitan in 1905 after the spur was abandoned. The only newspaper being published in town at that time was the Capitan News, a Democratic newspaper, published, edited, and owned by John A. Haley.

(I guess nobody told the 1900 census taker that the town's name had supposedly been changed a year before.) I'm assuming that this town was pretty frontier-like as well. So it seems that up until this point, W. C. Cheatham had spent his entire life living in newly formed towns! According to the family history, W. C. only stayed in New Mexico between one and five years before moving on again. Since we'll see him in a new state on the next census, I think this is a good place to wrap things up for now.

Whew! This post took hours and hours to put together! When I see you all next time, we'll take a look at what the census records can tell us about W. C.'s time in Arizona.
                                                                                                                                            - Therese