Last week we looked a bit at the census records for Amelia Virginia Blackshear's family. Census records are always a great place to start - they help us build a basic framework and point us in the right direction to start searching for other clues about a family. Even though there are quite often errors in spellings, and, since they are limited to ten year increments, it is possible to miss children who died at an early age, census records at least give us some idea how many kids were in a family, their gender, their names and their relative ages. (Of course, with early branches of a family - before 1850 - there are no names listed except for the head of household, making it very hard to find out whether we have found the right person/family without having at least one later census to check the gender and ages of children.)
The Census records are also a great source of information when trying to track the movements of a family. They at least let us know where the family was living every ten years. (Of course, they don't tell you anything about where the family was in the interim, which we experienced with trying to pin down W. C. Cheatham's birth location!) They also show where each child was supposedly born, and I say supposedly because I've come across a lot of inconsistency on this item of information in cases where I know without a doubt that it is the same person. So, we have to be a bit more careful when tracking the family that way, but if the same birth location is reported on every document we find for a person, I think we can accept it as being most likely correct.
If you've read through our family history, you'll know that so many branches from our family seemed to be moving ever westward during the 1800's. The Blackshears were no exception. Many Southern families moved west as lands that had previously been occupied by Native Americans were opened up, and a lot of them were later displaced due to factors associated with the Civil War. I don't think it is just a coincidence that all of those branches of our family came through Texas, which, being on the frontier, means that of course they were moving further west. Maybe the fact that they were in Texas in the first place says something about the opportunistic nature of those ancestors who picked up their families and moved them from state to state and then through various counties of Texas, moving ever westward.
Today we are going to use the primary source documents that I've found to trace the migration of Amelia Virginia's family, using the census records and filling in the gaps with other sources when possible.
So, where to start? This is where it gets tricky. Since we are doing Amelia Virginia's family right now, we are also talking about her parents and siblings. Her older brothers and sisters were all born in Georgia, so we definitely want to start there. But do we want to start with her father as a child? Because if we do, that means we have to talk about his father a bit as well. Hmmmmm.
Well, I looked for Silas' family on the 1820 census and didn't find them. So, I guess we'll start with the 1830 census. Silas Blackshear was already a teenager in that year and would have been out on his own before the next census took place.
Here is the top portion of the 1830 census page that our Blackshears were found on:
1830 U. S. Federal Census
Houston County, Georgia pg1 (detail)
If you look at the far left-hand column, it asks for the name of the county, city, ward etc., and the census taker filled in "Houston County." That's all. It doesn't tell us where in Houston County on this page. So I looked at the second page to see if it would give us more information:
1830 U. S. Federal Census
Houston County, Georgia pg2 (detail)
I had to look at other pages to figure out what was written in the top, and it turns out it is just the guy's last name and then it says "and for the." Well. That was completely unhelpful. So we know that Silas was living with his parents somewhere in Houston County, Georgia in 1830.
So, I spent the better part of three hours trying to find information online about what Houston County, Georgia was like in 1830, and wouldn't you know, I came up completely empty-handed! Here is the information I did manage to glean - maybe if we patch it together we can get some kind of idea:
This is a map of what Georgia looked like in 1830 (if you go to MapofUS.org you can view the interactive map showing the formation of counties over time):
Georgia Counties
1830
Houston County was formed in 1821 from lands that had belonged to the Creek Indians (and apparently is pronounced "Howston," not "Hueston" like in Texas!). It was on the western front of land populated by white settlers until 1826, when the rest of the Creek lands were opened up for settlement.
(So you see, Houston County did not exist in 1820. Which means, contrary to what a lot of people have on their trees, Silas Blackshear could not have been born in Houston County. I've seen some that place his birth in Twiggs County - just east of Houston - but wouldn't you know, the 1820 census records have been lost for three counties of Georgia, Twiggs being one of them. Which probably explains why I didn't find the family on the 1820 census!)
The population of Houston County in 1830 was 7,369, of whom 5,161 people were white, and 2,208 were negroes (virtually all of whom were slaves). I decided to look through the actual census pages to give you a better breakdown of the demographics:
Heads of Household: 920
(Most were families with children. Just over 100 of these households had a person over the age of 60 living with them. A lot of the neighboring men had the same last name, telling us that a lot of relatives moved there together.)Families with Slaves: 324
(So, about one third of the families held slaves, even though the slaves themselves made up about 43% of the total population. The number of slaves per household ranged from one to 53, but most fell in the range of 1-15 or so. The breakdown of male to female slaves was about equal - there was about an equal distribution for those who only had one, so some families had one or more slaves only for field work and some had one or more only as house servants. As the number of males in any given household increased, so did the females. I did notice that there were a whole lot of slaves who were little girls under the age of ten, though.)Free Persons of Color: Approximately nine people across four households (It might have been only seven people - I'm not sure if I tallied it right.)
Houston county had very rich soil, which meant it was good for farming. (Which explains the large number of slaves.) According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia,
Early settlers, mostly winners of the land lottery of 1821, came from the Georgia coast and from the Carolinas and Virginia to grow corn, wheat, potatoes, and garden vegetables in the rich sandy loam that makes up most of the county. Proximity to the Ocmulgee River made the exporting of cotton and the importing of manufactured goods a reality. Log cabins gave way to sturdy white farmhouses and plantations.You know, I never really thought about it before, but this says that the early settlers in this part of Georgia lived in log cabins. I guess that would make sense, especially because most of those families were not living in towns - land tracts gained in the land lotteries (we'll talk more about those later) were usually between 160 and 202 acres. This means that there were about two to four families per square mile. (Actually, after I tallied the census record, I went and looked up the square mileage of the county and it comes out to only just over one family per square mile. I guess this means that there was either multiple tracts granted to the same person, or there was considerable consolidation occurring as tracts were sold in the first few years.)
Here is a photo of a log cabin in Georgia built around this time:
And here is another historic cabin that sits at the living history museum of Westville, Georgia:
And one more, also from the same time period:
Okay, so those all look like they have modern roofs on them, but you get the picture. It looks like there was quite a range in the size and quality of log cabins back then!
Anyway, the fact that the log cabins gave way to farmhouses and plantations is probably due to a couple of factors: new lands opened up to the west, and larger slave-holding properties wanted to buy up the neighboring land for their plantations. (By 1840, Houston County had a population of 4,861 whites and 4,850 negroes, which is a drop of about 5% in the number of landowners but more than double the number of slaves). According to the 1830 census, our family did not own any slaves. And Silas Blackshear was one of the ones who moved west, since we find the family in Stewart County in 1840.
Okay. I cropped this down so we could see it better, but it still isn't really big enough. (Clicking on the title will take you to the whole document. I'll include page 2 when I put up the final Blackshear page.) There are two ways to tell where the family was living during this census year. First, at the top of the second page, it says "Ga" and "The 4th Judicial Circuit Court." Of course, when I tried to look that up online, I got just about everything except what I was looking for. Luckily, the census taker wrote some more specific information over on the left-hand margin of the first page, which is what I was trying to show you in the image above. It says, "Twentieth District Stewart County Georgia."
You wouldn't believe how much time it took to find out where that was! (It seems like the more stuff that gets put online, the harder it is for the search engine to find what you're looking for.) Here is a map so you can see where Stewart County is, and its proximity to Houston County:
(Okay, so by 1840 all of the Indian lands had been formed into counties, but for some reason I couldn't format the new map properly so we've got this one again! Many of these counties have since been subdivided, so this at least shows what the ones we are talking about looked like in 1840.)
And here is a land district map showing just the portion around those two counties:
Georgia Land District Map
Now, this is a tricky one to read. The bold lines show the original counties that were surveyed when the land was acquired from the Creek Indians, and then given out in the land lottery of 1827. Notice how those original counties are divided by solid lines into (mostly) square blocks. Those are the districts. Now, take a look at the county in the bottom left, which was Lee County. You'll see that inside of its boundaries there are dashed lines - those show the present day counties. Stewart County, which was formed in 1830 (once enough white settlers took possession of the land), is over on the western border of the state. So you see how the original land districts do not match up with the new county borders? District 20 is mostly in Stewart county, but the bottom portion (where the number is actually shown on this map) ended up in Randolph County.
So anyway, Silas and his family were living somewhere in that area south of the town of Lumpkin. We don't know exactly when they moved there, but the area had only been open to white settlers for ten years by the time this census was taken.
Now, Silas had married sometime after the 1830 census, but before this one, probably 1833 or 34 (if we trust the record written down by Frances Angeline's grandson, she was born in August 1834, which means her parents were probably married by the end of 1833.) We also don't know exactly when they arrived in Stewart County - it could have been as early as right after the 1830 census, or as late as right before the 1840 census.
By 1840 he already had five children, four of whom were under the age of five, and both of his parents were living with him. I'm assuming he was farming since that is what he was doing in later years when his occupation is reported. Once again, the family did not own any slaves.
Here is a breakdown of the census statistics just for the twentieth district:
Heads of Household: 1,116
The interesting thing here is that the 20th district contained 224 original land lots of 202.5 acres apiece. If I did the math right, that would be a total of 45,360 acres, which is almost 71 square miles. If you divide that up by 1,116 households, you get a figure of one family per 40.6 acres. Which is 16 families per square mile. That is a pretty dense population, considering most everyone was farming, and there were some pretty large plantations. (I looked it up, and a typical plantation ranged from 500 to more than 1000 acres!) There must have been some towns, then (in addition to Lumpkin).Families with Slaves: 285
This means that 25.5% of the families were slaveholders. It looked like about half of those had between one and ten slaves, and maybe about 10% had more than 25 slaves (the two with the highest numbers that I saw had 65 and more than 100.)Free Persons of Color: (There were 4 households with free persons of color, but the census had them attached to a white family, whatever that meant.)
Here is what the New Georgia Encyclopedia had to say about Stewart County:
The first Europeans in present-day Stewart County were the Spanish, who moved through the area about 1639. However, legal settlement began with the state's fifth land lottery, held in 1827, when Lee County became one of five new west Georgia counties. In 1828 the state sectioned off the western part of Lee to create Randolph County, which in turn was divided on December 23, 1830, to create Stewart. In 1853 the eastern part of Stewart became Kinchafoonee (later Webster) County, and in 1858 the newly established Quitman County absorbed a western piece of Stewart.
The treaty that wrested west Georgia from Native Americans ended in conflict. By 1836 the remaining Creek Indians began ambushing homes and communities in desperation. The settlers called on Governor William Schley for protection. Schley sent state militia volunteers from Gwinnett County to establish three local forts—Ingersoll, Jones, and McCreary. On May 15, 1836, the river settlement of Roanoke was burned by a reported 300 Indians. On June 9 the Battle of Shepherd's Plantation marked an end to skirmishes in the county and, essentially, in the state.
The county population exploded from 1836 to 1850. Settlers poured in, mainly from other fall line counties, especially Jones, Washington, and Wilkes. Stewart soon became one of Georgia's top-three cotton producers (more than 7.6 million pounds in 1850). Lumpkin, in turn, served as the area's center of commerce and stagecoach routings.
By the 1850s, however, signs of decline began to manifest. Rail construction—connecting to west Georgia's cotton producers—passed north and south of the county but not through it. It would be 1885 before a rail finally entered Stewart, leading to the incorporation of Richland in 1889.
Additionally, the European-influenced farming practices of the time led to devastating soil erosion in Stewart County. Underlying soil structures in the area yielded multiple gullies in place of the once-fertile crop fields. As the soil washed away, so too did Stewart County's economic strength. Stewart County lost population in every decade of the twentieth century.So, it's quite possible that our family was a part of that influx that began in 1836. I can imagine it must have been something of a land-grab, with some of the original lottery winners selling off their property, possibly in subdivided parcels. If they were there that early, it would mean that they had to live through the fear of the Indian raids. As for the soil erosion, believe it or not, this photo shows the result:
Providence Canyon State Park, GA
This canyon is in the area west of Lumpkin, but I'm guessing there was soil erosion throughout the county, just to a lesser degree. I'm also guessing that the erosion began to affect the quality of the soil and thus the ability to grow crops long before rainwater and runoff began to cause gullies of this magnitude (the article makes it sound like there were already problems by 1850). Maybe the decline in soil quality was the reason that our Blackshears decided to move on, because we find them on the 1850 census in Arkansas:
Of course, we've seen this one before, but today we are going to be looking at different things. This page was enumerated in November of 1850. This means that at the end of that year, Silas Blackshear and his family were living in Arkansas. According to the top of the page, they lived in Franklin Township in Union County. Let's look at another map, then, shall we?
(Okay, we're actually going to look at a few.) Just in case any of you have forgotten your grade-school geography lessons, here is map of the southern states:
As you can see, Arkansas isn't really all that close to Georgia. Now, here is a map of just Arkansas, so we can see where Union County is:
Arkansas
There it is, right there at the bottom. The county borders with Louisiana, but isn't too far from the border of Texas. So, where is the town of Franklin? Believe it or not, it's pretty hard to find a map of just Union County from the 1800's. So here is a modern map - I would think the townships wouldn't have really changed:
Union County, Arkansas Townships
Okay, up at the top then. But still pretty close to the Louisiana border.
Arkansas barely became a state in 1836. By 1840 the population of Union County was only 2,889 people. By 1850, it had risen to 10,298. Once again, we don't know when our family left Georgia for Arkansas, so they might have arrived when it was sparsely populated, or they might have moved there when it was already widely inhabited. According to the Central Arkansas Library System Encyclopedia of Arkansas,
Immigrants from Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi spurred a rapid population growth in the 1840s, followed by a slower rise in the next decade. More than half of the 12,288 residents in 1860 were slaves. About five percent of the landholders were planters (holding twenty or more slaves), and a third of the county’s slaves labored on these larger farms. Besides raising corn, Union County was second in the state in the production of peas, beans, and sweet potatoes.So it seems that it wasn't all that different from Stewart County, Georgia.
All right. Enough with the maps. (For now anyway!) The 1850 census gives us so much more information than the previous ones, so let's see what it can tell us. Here is the top portion of the census form so you can see what questions were asked:
So, this year the census recorded the names and ages of every family member, as well as their place of birth. It also wanted the occupation of everyone over the age of 15, which tells us that a lot of men were working by the age of 16 back then. It also asked for the value of any real estate owned, if anyone was married within the year, and if anyone attended school. It also wanted to know if any adults were illiterate or disabled or otherwise unable to care for themselves. Oh, and remember, the families were supposed to report anyone who was living with the family as of June 1st of that year.
Here is a breakdown from the 1850 Census for Franklin Township:
Families: 165
Free White Persons: 931
Free Persons of Color: 2
Slaves: 461
Slave-Holding Families: 62 (which works out to 38%. Just over half of these held five or less slaves, and about 10% held more than 20 slaves.)
Farmers: 109 (some were sons of heads of household)
Farmers Reporting Value of Real Estate: 64
Carpenters: 3
School Teachers: 2
Physicians: 2
Grocers: 2
Merchants: 1
Blacksmiths: 1
Clerks: 1
Clergy: 1
Laborers: 1
Reg's of Land Office: 1
Illegible: 1
Illiterate Adults: 33 males, 48 females (not always both parents in a family)
Families w/ School-Aged Children Attending School: 39
Families w/ School-Aged Children Not Attending School: 42
Families w/ Only Some School-Aged Children Attending School: 3
So, not much more than farming going on over there.
Now, here is the detail of our family:
Silas M. Blackshear Family
1850 Census
Franklin Township, Union County, Arkansas
So what does the census tell us about them? Well, for one thing, it tells us that the family had added three children since 1840. It tells us they were still in Georgia in 1845, because their son James was five years old and had been born in Georgia. It also tells us that they had been in Arkansas for at least a year, because Amelia Virginia was one year old and had been born in that state. So, the family left Georgia some time between 1845 and 1849.
It tells us that Silas was a farmer, but it doesn't show anything for the value of his land. Since just over half of the farmers reported a value for their real estate, this could mean that Silas didn't actually own the land he was farming. (Or, it could mean that his wife was the informant and she didn't have a clue.)
It also tells us that both Silas and his wife were literate, but that none of the children attended school within the previous year! (At first I thought maybe the census taker was just lazy, but after tabulating the statistics and seeing that about an equal number of families did and did not send their kids to school, I figured that maybe Sophena was just teaching the kids to read and write at home. Most kids didn't attend school until age eight or nine back then, which means the Blackshear kids old enough for school were girls.)
Well, it looks like that's all that the census is going to give us. But wait! There were also some non-population schedules in 1850 - maybe the family can be found on the slave, agricultural, or manufacturing schedules. . . well, apparently there are no surviving mortality or agricultural schedules for Arkansas from 1850. But look what I did find:
This shows Silas owning one slave, who was a twelve year old girl, so a house slave and not a field hand.
I actually did find Silas on an agricultural schedule for 1850, though. Just not in Arkansas:
According to the information we have so far (census record locations, children's approximate birth dates & locations), the family lived in Georgia until at least 1845, was in Arkansas by 1849, and (if you remember from the last post) was in Texas by 1853 or so. The 1850 regular census shows the family living in Union County, Arkansas. The 1860 regular census shows the family living in Anderson County, Texas. And where does the 1850 agricultural schedule (the document above) show the family living? Anderson County, Texas. Wait. What?
When I noticed this last week, I was like, This doesn't make any sense! The family is living in Arkansas, but the father is farming in Texas? (It especially didn't make sense because the father himself was listed on the census in Arkansas!) At first I thought maybe there was a different S. M Blackshear, but this says Beat 5, Plenitude, which is exactly where the family would be living ten years later. That's too much of a coincidence. (Besides, I've never found another S. M. Blackshear in Anderson County except for Silas' son who has the same initials.)
So how is it that the whole family was recorded as living in one place, but the father was recorded as farming in an entirely different state? Is it possible that the family lived in both Arkansas and Texas in 1850 and somehow got on the census records for both places?
My first thought was to look at the dates that the family's information was recorded for each form. So I pulled up the agricultural schedule census page on Ancestry and I noticed that there is no date at the top of the page. It wouldn't be the first time that Ancestry had items under the wrong label, so I thought I'd double check. I started scrolling through the pages and found that there isn't a date at the top of any of the pages like this one, because there is no blank in which to put the date. (The blank was on the second page, and all of those are missing. I think I might have found them under a different beat, but there is no way to know which first pages they pair up with because only the first pages had page numbers! And everyone thinks digitized documents are so much better than the original record books!)
Anyway, some pages had a different heading, and those had a date. Some of those said 1850, and some said 1860 and some said 1870 and some said 1880 (even though the menu bar at the top claimed that I was searching through the 1850 records). And the page numbers in the upper left corner were all out of order. (Aren't you glad I'm the one searching through these records instead of you?) And then I noticed that the title of the record collection was "U. S. Selected Federal Census, Non-Population Schedules, 1850 -1880." So I thought, maybe the collection is a bunch of mixed up random pages from the entire thirty years! Well, the more I looked at the forms, the more convinced I became of this, so I thought maybe this wasn't actually the 1850 form at all (that would have made things a lot easier, you know!) But, after five more minutes of comparing numerous document pages, I realized that every single one that said 1860 was perfectly readable and not smudgy. They all looked like the 1860 regular census page and slave census page, and were even signed by the same guy who signed both of those pages. Which means it is definitely from 1850.
So, I didn't find a date, but as it turns out, the dates shouldn't have really mattered anyway:
According to the National Archives, this is what the instructions for the 1850 regular census say:
3. Under heading 3, entitled, "The name of every person whose usual place of abode on the 1st day of June, 1850, was in this family," insert the name of every free person in each family, of every age, including the names of those temporarily absent, as well as those that were at home on that day. The names of every member of a family who may have died since the 1st day of June is to be entered and described as if living, but the name of any person born since the 1st day of June is to be omitted. The names are to be written beginning with the father and mother; or if either, or both, be dead, begin with some other ostensible head of the family; to be followed, as far as practicable, with the name of the oldest child residing at home, then the next oldest, and so on to the youngest, then the other inmates, lodgers and borders, laborers, domestics, and servants.The agricultural schedule was supposed to record information for the an entire year ending June 30, 1850. (So the dates the actual forms were recorded shouldn't matter.) The name listed could have been the "owner, agent, or manager." I couldn't find specific instructions for the agricultural schedule online, but the following information might be useful here:
Exclusions--Not every farm was included in these schedules. In 1850, for example, small farms that produced less than $100 worth of products annually were not included. By 1870, farms of less than three acres or which produced less than $500 worth of products were not included.
Nonresidents Enumerated--The agriculture and manufacturing schedules are not limited to persons who resided in the particular township or county.That first part might have helped us if there was an agricultural schedule for Arkansas, but there isn't. As for the second part, it explains that Silas didn't have to be actually living in Texas in order to be listed on the agricultural schedule there.
I tried checking to see if just Silas turned up on the regular census for Anderson County, Texas and didn't find him, but of course the first 26 families were missing for some reason, so I guess it is possible that he might have been there anyway. So. Maybe the family was planning on moving there (it would be their next stop after all) and so Silas went on ahead to buy land and get a farm up and running. Or maybe he just owned land there, and somebody else was actually farming it for him.
Texas barely became a part of the United States in 1845, and there was a huge influx of settlers in the following years. According to the Texas State Historical Association,
As a further inducement to settlers, in 1845 the Congress of the republic passed the first Pre-emption Act, which gave to persons who had previously settled upon and improved vacant public lands, or who might thereafter settle upon and improve them, the right to purchase (pre-empt) up to 320 acres. Pre-emptors, or homesteaders, were required to cover their locations with valid certificates within three years. Under the state government this period was extended to January 1, 1854.And about Anderson County specifically,
After the removal of the Indians in the 1840s, settlement proceeded rapidly until the area had sufficient inhabitants to form a new county. In response to a petition presented by settlers at and around Fort Houston, the First Legislature of the state of Texas formed Anderson County from Houston County on March 24, 1846. . .
Most of the settlers in the county came from the southern states and from Missouri. In 1850 the county population was 2,884, of which 600 were slaves, but by 1860 the population had increased to 10,398, of which 3,668 were slaves. During the same time, cotton production had grown from 784 bales to 7,517 bales. Anderson County showed steady growth in population and agricultural production during the antebellum period.So, maybe Silas had heard about the land in Texas and wanted to take advantage of it. Maybe the family had actually decided to move to Texas when they left Georgia, but made a stop-over in Arkansas. Arkansas isn't exactly on the way to Texas, but maybe Sophena had relatives there or something who were going to watch over her and the kids while Silas was away getting their land in Texas. Maybe the family wasn't planning to stay in Arkansas for very long, but Sophena had a difficult pregnancy and birth with Amelia Virginia and they decided she'd better stay put for awhile. Whatever was happening, let's take a look at what the schedule had to say:
Here are the questions asked (clicking on the image will take you to the pdf which has both parts and can be read more easily):
So, we should be able to find out how much land he had, how much livestock, and how much of certain types of produce. This is what the second page asked:
This page would have told us more about what he was growing or making (like cheese or molasses). Unfortunately, since all of the second pages are lumped together in a different file and none of them have page numbers, it is impossible to know which ones match up. Which is a real shame, because the cotton questions are on the second page.
So here is a detail of Silas Blackshear's information:
Silas Blackshear had 813 acres of land, only 80 of which were improved (which could support the idea that he hadn't had the land for very long). As for the cash value of the farm, I can't read the census taker's handwriting, but it is between 1000 and 2000 dollars. (Maybe 1750? Anyway, I looked over the whole page and his seems to be in the middle range.) The value of his farming implements and machinery was $100, which was on the higher end of average (almost nobody on this page had a value of more than $200.) He had no horses, but 3 mules (which is probably why so little of his land was under cultivation). He had 4 milch cows, 2 working oxen, and 18 head of other cattle. He had no sheep, but 28 swine. The total value of his livestock was reported as $440, which was on the higher end of average (62% of the farms on this page reported livestock values of $500 or less).
His farm produced 350 bushels of Indian corn (which is the equivalent of 65 50-gallon drums). According to the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, in 1850 two and a half acres would generally produce about 100 bushels of corn. So he had about ten percent of his land planted with corn. (See how much fun math can be?) Oh! And guess what? Although the blank census form shows the cotton question on page two, it is actually on this page. Woohoo! He produced twelve 400-lb bales of ginned cotton. (Figuring out how many acres this would have taken was quite an endeavor. Today, Texas produces about one 480-lb bale per acre - an acre in Arizona will produce 3 bales! I couldn't find any historical information for this, and I don't know how modern methods would affect output compared to back then. All I do know is that he grew a lot more cotton than almost everyone else on this page.)
So, to summarize, it looks like - assuming Silas Blackshear was farming the land himself or had someone managing it for him - the family was doing relatively well. If he had sharecroppers farming it, it still would have brought the family a decent amount of profit.
Of course, the fact that the family could afford a house slave, even a little girl (which, if I did my math correctly would have cost them the modern equivalent of $6000), means that they were far from struggling financially.
Okay. Let's move on to the next census:
In 1860 the family was living in Beat 5 (Plenitude), Anderson County, Texas. Aaaaaannnnd here is a map:
(We'll just re-use the map I made when we were researching W. C. Cheatham. No need to reinvent the wheel and all that!) Anderson County is the one marked in yellow. In 1860, you could pretty much draw a vertical line along the western side of Taylor County (orange), and that is pretty much as far as the settlement of Texas had gone.
As far as the location of Plenitude goes, I wasn't able to find it on any maps. So here is a rundown of my detective work:
I found a 2005 message board discussion saying it was in the vicinity of Mound Prairie (also not find-able on a map). After about an hour more of searching, I found out that Plenitude wasn't a real town. It was just a rural area with a post office between Montalba and Mound Prairie, north of Palestine. The Plenitude post office was closed in 1883 and there is nothing left today to show that there was ever anything there. Well, I didn't like how vague "north of Palestine" sounded, so I decided to dig around some more, and I found this:
5 May 1857
Galveston Weekly News
(Galveston, Texas)
Ah. So Plenitude was eight miles north of Palestine.
I then looked up a whole bunch of maps for Anderson County, and discovered that they all show Montalba, but as to where Mound Prairie was, I still had no clue. I did find out that there is a Mound Prairie Cemetery on the outskirts of Neches, though:
Okay, so, Mound Prairie was close to where Neches now sits. I managed to find a 1907 postal map showing both Montalba and Neches. So this is where our Blackshears lived:
The questions asked on the 1860 census were identical to those of the 1850 census. So here is what the population in and around Plenitude looked like:
Families: 170
Adult Males Living with a Family (Boarders): 50
Free White Persons: 914
Free Persons of Color: 0
Slaves: 480 (Pretty much equal number of males and females)
Slave-Holding Families: 78
Farmers: 129 (Not all were heads of household - some were sons or brothers or boarders.)
Farmers Reporting Value of Real Estate: 77
Farm Laborers: 17
C. Laborers: 7 (Whatever this is!)
Overseers: 6
Cotton Gin Manufacturing: 1 (Ten of the boarders lived on his property - gin agents, overseers, wagoners, & mechanics.)
Gin Agents: 2
Wagoners: 5
Carriage/Wagon Makers: 3
Mechanics: 15
Machinists: 1
Engineers: 2
Lawyers: 1
Lumber/Saw Milling: 3
Ox Drivers: 1
Saddler: 1
Brick Masons: 1
Gun Makers: 1 (It looks like this was the oldest son of the cotton gin manufacturer.)
Boot & Shoe Makers: 2
Tailors: 1
Carpenters: 8
School Teachers: 4
Doctors: 4 (ages 35, 27, 27, and 21!)
Dentists: 1
Blacksmiths: 2
Merchants: 0 (Strange! Did they all have to go to a neighboring town for supplies? There were three residences marked as "unoccupied," which I thought meant vacant, but maybe meant nobody was home. Maybe at least one of these was a merchant?!) )
Clerks: 4
Ministers: 3
Families w/ School-Aged Children Attending School: 56
Families w/ School-Aged Children Not Attending School: 47
Families w/ Only Some School-Aged Children Attending School: (I didn't tally these, but there were probably around ten)
So, Plenitude had a saw mill, and a cotton gin manufacturing operation. It had some support trades, like blacksmiths and bootmakers, etc., so it was definitely a step up from where they lived in Arkansas! Farmers (and planters) made up 76% of the families, though.
After looking for the map of Plenitude (I write these posts all out of order and then move stuff around!), I discovered that Mound Prairie (about four miles to the east) was a proper town. (One guy insisted that Plenitude and Mound Prairie were the same thing, and that Plenitude was just the name of the post office, but everything I've found since, especially newspaper articles implies that this is not the case.) I think Mound Prairie must have also been a part of Beat 5, because none of the records in any of the ten beats said Mound Prairie at the top. (Either that, or there are quite a few pages missing from the census records.) I guess that's probably where everyone went shopping, and actually a lot of those tradesmen probably lived in or at least closer to Mound Prairie.
And here is just the portion with our family:
1860 U. S. Federal Census
Beat 5, Anderson County, Texas
Silas M. Blackshear Family
Silas M. Blackshear Family
We see that two children, both boys, were added to the family since 1853. Because the census shows their birth place as Texas, we know that the family had moved there by 1853 at the latest. Which makes a lot of sense since Silas was already working a farm there in 1850.
Silas' wife Sophena, his daughter Samantha, and son James were all missing by 1860. As I mentioned last time, Samantha was married to John Rogers in 1857 in Anderson County. She can be found on the same census page, three families down:
Her family was split between two pages. Here are the children:
Obviously, she wasn't the first wife of John Rogers, because neither of these children could have been hers.
Everything I've come across says that Sophena had died by this time, which is the most plausible reason for her to be missing from the census. Everyone also assumes that James had also died, although nobody know exactly when.
Once again, none of the children were attending school. And, once again, I thought that was strange. But guess what? Apparently, there were no public schools in Anderson County until 1881! (There was a private school in Mound Prairie - this must be where the children who were attending school went.) As we can see above, however, Samantha is not marked as being unable to read and write, and, as we'll see in an upcoming post, the children were being educated - probably by their mother until she died, and then the older children probably took over with the younger children.
Okay. I was really hoping to see an agricultural schedule for 1860, but of course, the ones from Anderson County have been lost. The regular census does tell us, though, that Silas valued his land at $1700. I couldn't find anything online to estimate how many acres that would have been, but there were 27 farms in Plenitude with a greater value, and 47 farms with a lesser value. That means he was in the top 40%. (Oh, and I just remembered that I mentioned before that a typical plantation was 500 to more than 1000 acres, and in 1850 Silas had about 800 acres of land. So, yeah, the family wasn't doing too poorly.)
We do find Silas on the 1860 slave schedule, which is not much of a surprise considering he couldn't possibly work all that land by himself.
Out of the 78 families who owned slaves in the Plenitude postal district, 53 of them owned 5 or less slaves (That's 68%) and 5 owned 20 or more (That's less than 1%. - the largest holding was 60 slaves). 53% of the total population were slaves. Silas owned two - a 40 year old male and a 17 year old male, which means they were both field hands. If we could look at the agricultural schedule for Silas, I'll bet we'd see a lot more acres under production and a lot more cotton being grown.
And that brings us to the 1870 census, at which point the family just drops off the radar. I couldn't find Silas or any of his children who were not yet married (I haven't taken the time to look for the older girls yet). And I don't just mean in Anderson County. I also looked through every single page of the records for Robertson County, since Amelia Virginia would get married there in 1871. (Of course, the pages for the town where her future husband and his father were probably living were all missing, so maybe that's where she was.)
Anyway, everybody, including the author of the Blacksheariana, assumes that Silas had died by 1870. In which case, there's no telling who the children were living with. They could have been together, or they could have been split up. I've done some searching, both using the Ancestry search tool and just reading through pages and pages of census records, but so far I've come up empty handed. Most of the children will show up again in 1880 (when, of course, they are no longer children), but we'll talk about what happened to them all in another post.
Well, it looks like just examining the census records took ages and ages (so much for my shorter posts!), so even though I said up there at the beginning that we were going to be looking at other documents as well, we're definitely not going to get to them today!
Just from the census information though, we can see that Silas Blackshear moved ever westward throughout his life - every ten years he was living in a different county or state. And every one of those places in which he lived was a rural areas on the frontier. Next time we'll see if we can find any other records to help us pin down more exact dates for each time the family pulled up stakes and moved on.
- Therese
Update: Some of the conclusions drawn in this post later turned out to be incorrect. The mistakes are corrected in subsequent posts, along with an explanation and documents showing how the mistake was discovered.
