In my last post, I was lamenting the fact that I was unable to find the court records that I was looking for, as well as the fact that the case papers are most likely still sitting in the courthouse archives, but, since they are all the way in Texas, they might as well be lost. It's times like that when research gets to be super frustrating. But, do you know when else it is super frustrating? When you think you have things all figured out, and then find some other document or piece of evidence that turns everything on its head. Super. Frustrating.
Take a look at this map:
Anderson County, Texas
The census record for 1860 tells us that our Blackshears lived in Beat 5, Plenitude postal district, Anderson County, Texas. The 1850 (agricultural schedule) shows that Silas was farming in the same location. I did a lot of research to find out where Plenitude was. I read messages on message boards written by current historians in Anderson County. I checked postal maps and cemetery data. I found old newspaper articles saying Plenitude was eight miles north of Palestine. I even discovered that Plenitude was a postal district, but also, maybe, an actual town or community.
I also thought I had my bases covered with the exact location of the Blackshear land. I had the deed giving a description of where it was. I had a handful of historic maps showing exactly where the "Heirs of Wm B. Harrison" land patent was. I even looked up the original Harrison land patent and compared the description of the land to the maps! (If anyone wants a copy, let me know.)
I thought I had covered my bases. I knew exactly where the Silas Blackshear family was living. Case closed, right?
Well, while going through the Anderson County District Court civil record books for the third time, double checking to make sure I didn't just somehow miss the Scarborough case records, I stumbled across an earlier case, from 1853, in which Silas Blackshear was suing one George Hanks (the uncle of J. S. Hanks, who signed as a surety for Silas' guardian bond and was a co-defendant in his two other lawsuits).
I had actually seen the case on an index to the minutes, and had found the civil minutes pages for it weeks ago:
Pretty much, the minutes just said that Silas Blackshear sued George Hanks, won the case, and was awarded $255 in damages. Here are the minutes pages and a transcription if you want to take a look:
| Blackshear vs Hanks Civil Minutes Book B pg 320 |
Blackshear vs Hanks Civil Minutes Book B pg 404 |
Blackshear vs Hanks Civil Minutes Book B pg 405 |
Blackshear vs Hanks Civil Minutes Transcription |
Since these didn't really tell me anything, I promptly forgot about the case, well before I discovered that there were also civil records. When I actually read the pages from the record book, I was super excited, because, you know, more pieces to the puzzle = a better picture of an ancestor's life. We get some great new information from this one:
here, and it will be on the Blackshear page when I finally put that up. (It's coming soon, I promise!)
The first time I read through these pages, there were a lot of words I couldn't decipher, so I just got a general idea of what was going on. Apparently, Silas Blackshear had made an agreement with George Hanks, his son, George W. Hanks, and another man, W. R. Rogers on the 22nd of January 1852. Any or all of those men were supposed to deliver 75 head of average cattle, worth a total value of $750, to Silas no later than the last day of March, 1853. They were supposed to deliver the cattle to the Blackshear residence on Catfish Creek. Apparently, 34 head of cattle were delivered to him in May of 1852, but he never received the rest. Silas therefore sued for damages. The funny thing is, he sued for the entire $750. The jury only awarded him $255 dollars, though, which I'm guessing was the value of the cattle he never received. (You should read through the whole records/transcription because it is actually kind of humorous. The court minutes I put up first tell us that George Hanks appealed the case to the Texas Supreme Court, but neither the records nor the minutes tell what the outcome of that was, and I haven't found those documents online.)
So, there are several details here that help flesh out the picture of our ancestors' lives, but the big piece of new information is that Silas Blackshear was living and farming/ranching on Catfish Creek.
I decided to double check a map for the location of Catfish Creek, thinking it would be over there on the Neches River where Silas had that land that was auctioned off in 1860. And that is when my joy at finding new pieces to the puzzle withered and died, and my research endeavor became more and more frustrating.
It turns out that Catfish Creek is nowhere near that piece of land.
I found the creek on Google maps, because hey, that's the easiest first step, right? It turns out that Catfish Creek is a tributary of the Trinity River, which creates the western border of Anderson County. Silas' land that was auctioned off was next to the Neches River, which creates the eastern border of the county. Huh.
Okay. There was no way to show you this and still show more of the map (you can use Tennessee Colony in the upper right corner as a reference point). The red arrow shows the location of Catfish Creek according to Google Maps. You can see that it is very, very wide. It looks at least as wide as the river itself. When you go to satellite view, it is only about half as wide, but still pretty substantial. (There was actually a ferry for crossing it way back in the day.)
So I made a new map:
Now, I stuck a nice big X over this, so that nobody will copy it. That is because, if you zoom in and in and in and in some more, it turns out that google finally sticks another label saying "Catfish Creek" way up at the very ends of the tributary, up north of Tennessee Colony! That means that the family could have been living anywhere along the entire length of it, and my star marking a spot is absolutely no good. On top of that, I checked all of the historic maps, and guess what they say?
The maps of the 1850's through 1870's show the wide part that is closer to the Trinity River (the only part you can actually see on the Google map above) as being called "Catfish Bayou." They don't write in "Catfish Creek" until way up at the other end, on either side of the northern boundary of the county:
Anderson County, Texas
(northern portion)
This is a portion of a map from 1855. (You can enlarge and view the original at the Portal to Texas History website.) The green arrow shows the northern boundary of Anderson County. The dark blue arrows show the two rivers on the eastern and western boundaries. The light blue is what Google maps calls Catfish Creek; but this map calls the southern portion Catfish Bayou, and does not put another label until it branches off into the medium blue section, which it has labeled as Catfish Creek.
(On a side note, this historic map shows the left-hand branch of Catfish Bayou as being called Otter Creek, but Google Maps shows a branch of Beaver Creek - the creek that branches off of Catfish Bayou near the bottom of this portion of the map - as being called Otter Creek. What a headache trying to figure out where things were located in the past! If I had a document saying someone lived on Otter Creek, and I didn't have the historic map, I would think it was in a totally different place!)
The little red box over on the right is the location of the land that Silas owned and lost in 1860. So from looking at this map, it appears that the place where they were living in 1852-53 was about twelve miles north of Tennessee Colony.
So I made another map. (Sigh. This is actually like, version number eight!)
Anderson County, Texas
Silas Blackshear Family Residences
Well, those two locations are still nowhere near each other. Where had I gone wrong?
I decided to go back and reread the documents again. The court case above was very specific in saying that Silas Blackshear was living on Catfish Creek in 1852. The deed giving the location of the Blackshear land that was sold at auction does not specifically say that the family was living on that tract of land, but the court case above strongly implies that he was not living on Catfish Creek by the fall of 1853 (it says "where petitioner then lived").
The family must have lived in two different locations during the ten or so years they were in Anderson County, then. But I didn't find a record of him owning any land before the plot that he had in 1860. Maybe he was just leasing or sharecropping or whatever during those early years in Texas. But, both the 1850 census agricultural schedule and the 1860 regular census both say the family lived in the Plenitude postal district.
So were both areas part of the Plenitude postal district? I couldn't find a single map anywhere showing either Plenitude or census beat 5. I mentioned in my earlier post that the Plenitude postal district stretched from Montalba to the eastern border, but then I was wondering if it was actually most of the northern section of the county, all the way down to Tennessee Colony (I did find that town listed as being in beat 5 in a historic document online).
Hmmm. I feel like more research is needed . . . . FIVE HOURS LATER . . . .
Okay, folks. There is some very conflicting information on old post offices out there. There is also a big mess of census records.
So, I went back and looked at an 1854 newspaper that I had come across before, advertising bids for all of the Texas postal routes. It names six post offices in Anderson County, only four of which were north of Palestine (which is the county seat and sits exactly in the middle of the county): Kickapoo (in the very northeastern corner of the county), Plenitude, Bethel, and Tennessee Colony. Both of the latter were closer to Catfish Creek than Plenitude.
Then I went back and looked through the 1860 census for Anderson County. It shows twelve "beats," each named after a postal district. I looked up each postal district and found that only five of the ones named had existed in 1850, the year the census had been taken. Of those, only Kickapoo and Plenitude were north of Palestine. But . . . the Plenitude post office was not even established until November of 1850, and the census was taken before that, in September.
I'm starting to think that the 1850 census agricultural schedule on Ancestry.com isn't really from 1850 at all - remember, there were no dates in the collection that supposedly spanned 1850 to 1880 and Ancestry just decided the documents were from 1850.
ONE HOUR LATER . . .
Okay. So I went back to the census records and wrote down the names of all of the farmers who had at least medium-sized farms in Anderson County for both the 1850 and 1860 census records. I did this because I assumed they were the most likely to be listed on the agricultural schedule. (The 1850 records lumped all areas together, so I went through all 54 pages. For the 1860 records, I only looked through the 24 pages in beat 5, Plenitude.) Then, I compared those lists to the 1850 slave schedule and the alleged 1850 agricultural schedule from beat 5, Plenitude. The names on the 1850 regular census and the 1850 slave schedule matched remarkably well, as they should have, since they were both dated 1850 at the top of the pages. The names on the 1860 regular census and on the (undated) agricultural schedule in question were almost identical, even down to being in the exact same order. They did not match up well at all with the names on the 1850 regular census or slave schedule. On top of that, the undated records Ancestry is calling 1850 are divided into twelve beats, and there were only six (actually five when the census was taken, and one of those was only around for two years) postal districts in 1850!
What does that mean? It means that we can throw my earlier conclusion that it was indeed the agricultural schedule from 1850 out the window. I am now 100% certain that those records are from 1860. (Why didn't I think of all this before, when I was writing my earlier post?!)
Which meeeeeeaaaaaans . . . Silas Blackshear was NOT in fact farming in Anderson County, Texas in 1850. (Do you see why you can't just blindly accept things people throw out there? We can't even blindly accept what Ancestry puts up!) I'm guessing he came with the whole family near the end of 1851, since the court case above is about a contract made on the 22nd of January, 1852.
Oh, and do you know what else I just thought of? The Scarborough vs Blackshear case said that Silas had spent money to bring his two slaves into the state of Texas. Which means it is very likely that he purchased them before moving to Texas, which means that he should have been listed on the 1850 slave schedule for Texas if he was farming there in that year. Instead, he was listed on the 1850 slave schedule for Arkansas, owning just a female house slave. (So yeah, the whole 1850 in Anderson County scenario is sounding more and more ridiculous.)
Really, an arrival in Anderson County after 1850 makes a whole lot more sense than if Silas were listed on the Arkansas census but farming in Texas during the same time. I thought it would be great if I could find him on the 1850 agricultural schedule for Arkansas, because that seems like it would be a nice extra nail in the coffin of the idea that he was in two places during the same year. I had looked and looked a few months ago and couldn't find those forms. But guess what? I actually found them today on FamilySearch.com (during those first five hours of research). The cover page for the microfilm actually says it is the mortality schedule, but it isn't! (I guess that's why I couldn't find it before! Good thing I decided to check out the first page anyway, huh?) Unfortunately, out of the two pages for Franklin Township, Union County, Arkansas, about 75% of the names were so washed out that they were completely illegible.
Of course they were. That's research for you!
On a final note, here's an interesting fact that I just came across - according to his will, George Hanks also lived on Catfish Creek, and had 950 acres at the time of his death in 1859 (even after having divided up some of his property among five of his sons). I'm guessing that, in 1852, Silas Blackshear was living and working on land owned by George Hanks, which would explain why he had moved by the fall of 1853 - you know, bad blood between them because of the whole lawsuit.
And since we are talking about where our family lived, here is another interesting bit of information: It was easy to imagine Silas being born and living in a log cabin way back in the early 1800's in Georgia, but did you know that log cabins were the construction of choice for most farmers in east Texas until at leas the 1870's? Here is a photo of the original log house belonging to J. S. Hanks in Anderson County:
 |
| Cabin of J. S. Hanks, Anderson County, Texas |
It is very likely that our Blackshears lived in a similar cabin when they first arrived in Texas (although I would hope it would have been a bit larger considering the number of children they had!) A cabin like this could have been raised in two days' time by two carpenters for about $20 (the price of three and a half head of average cattle in 1852!). How do I know this? I found a fascinating article about the old log cabins of Texas in an old issue of Texas Monthly magazine. (You should definitely read it. You can find a copy here.)
And by the way, if you were paying attention, you'd have noticed that the dates on my new map are different from the ones on my previous version. That's because I have spent more time thinking about all of the evidence I've gathered, and those are the dates I think we can be pretty sure of at this point. There is a gap of about four years in the dates, because we don't know for sure where they lived during that time. They could have been living on the land Silas would later purchase, or they could have lived someplace else in the interim.
And speaking of purchasing land, remember how I couldn't find a deed for the actual purchase? All I have is tax records and the sheriff's sale deed. But guess what? After finding this court case in the records books, I went back and looked for the other two cases (in which Silas and J. S. Hanks were co-defendants) in the records as well. I found them, and they give evidence for the purchase of the land from the same man who is listed on the tax records as the original owner, so now I have the seller's name and might be able to find the deed that way! If I get a chance to go look for it at a Family History Center in the next two weeks, I'll put those up in my next post. If not, we'll move on to the mystery of what happened to the family after 1863 instead. See you then!
- Therese
