A Bit of a Disappointment

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 17

Today we are going to finish up with the Baptist records by taking a look at the annuals of the Southern Baptist Convention.  I have to warn you, though:  You'll probably be disappointed.  

Although the SBC annuals are available in digital format online beginning with the year 1845 on the Southern Baptist Historical Library & Archives website, they do not include a list of ministers until 1898, which is probably why the Baylor University website doesn't have any copies before that year.  Now, we already know that Erasmus Miller Owen was pastoring a church in the town of Emma between 1901 and 1905, so we should expect to see him there in this set of records. 

But . . . we don't.  Not for the whole four years anyway.  Apparently, the Southern Baptist Convention received their information the same way that the Texas convention received theirs - from church and association minutes - and, as I've said before, apparently his church was either not communicating well with its association or the association clerk did not submit their records, because the Southern Baptist Convention only lists him in their annual during that period in the years 1904 and 1905:

Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention 1904

Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention 1905

Okaaaaay.  These two pages are pretty much meaningless by themselves.  The header at the top of each page tells us that it came from a book about the Southern Baptist Convention, but there is nothing to tell us which year or state the page is showing.   And wouldn't you know, the pdf of the whole book is too large to upload to my gallery on Ancestry, so I can't even attach this as a viewable source.

Then, of course, there is also the problem that these come from the 1904 and 1905 books, but they are actually showing the status as of 1903 and 1904.  Unless, that is, that the "denominational press" reported updated information or the church/pastor specifically notified the convention of a change of address before May 1 of the publication year.  (The convention was held in the middle of May.)  See?

This fact makes each individual page even more confusing as a source, because someone might automatically assume that it is giving information for the year that matches the date of the book, or assume that it is only reporting for the prior year, like the American Baptist Year-book.

But . . . did you notice the title of the section that these lists come from?  It says that the names are a list of pastors within the Southern Baptist Convention.  Not ordained ministers like the American Baptist Year-books show, or representatives sent to the convention like the annuals of the Texas General Convention show.   This is especially important when we look back at the book for 1900:

Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention 1900

This shows that E. M. Owen was the pastor of the Baptist church in the town of May during the year 1899, and/or up until or by May 1st of 1900.  So, the fact that he was pastoring a church is a good piece of information to have if you are trying to write somebody's story.  (The mess with the dates, not so much!)

Erasmus does not show up in the 1898 and 1899 books; I found something a couple of weeks ago that might indicate why, but I'm not ready to show that to you yet.  (Maybe next time.)  And, just as we would expect, he does not show up in the books that cover the years that he was in Oregon.  But, we discovered last week that he attended the Baptist General Convention in 1911 and 1914, and that he was representing churches in Rotan and Bangs respectively in those years.  Do we also find him in the Southern Baptist records?  Yes, we do.  For 1911, anyway:

Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention 1911

Of course, his name is misspelled as "E. N. Owen", so if we didn't already know that he was in Rotan, we probably would have completely overlooked him here.

Erasmus is not in the 1914 book, nor is he in any other book during the 1910s.  So that's it for the Baptist records.  I spent a whole lot of time looking for something else; it's amazing how you can put in the keyword "Baptist" on different days and turn up collections at universities and seminaries that didn't turn up on another day before.  Alas, no mention of Erasmus Miller Owen turned up in the new things I found.

So that's it.  I made this handy chart so we could compare what we discovered from the three annual Baptist publications:

	American Baptist Year-book	Texas Baptist Annual	Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention
1882	Bend, San Saba Co., TX Ordination (Feb)
1883	Clio, Brown Co., TX
1884	Clio, Brown Co., TX
1885	Clio, Brown Co., TX
1886	Clio, Brown Co., TX
1887	May, Brown Co., TX
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892	May, Brown Co., TX
1893	May, Brown Co., TX
1894	May, Brown Co., TX
1895	May, Brown Co., TX
1896	May, Brown Co., TX
1897	May, Brown Co., TX
1898	May, Brown Co., TX	May, Brown Co., TX
1899	May, Brown Co., TX	(Brown County, TX)	May, Brown Co., TX *

(I don't know why pasting a chart into this blog messes up my spacing, but at least all of the border lines showed up this time!)

Okay.  So, the red column reflect information that was from the present year, and the orange column reflects information gathered at the end of the previous year or potentially from the first five months of the present year.  The green reflects information that was compiled at the end of the previous year.  The red is the most reliable, because the Texas Baptist Annual was reporting men who actually attended the convention in November, and the convention also wrote letters to associations and churches to get updated information as well.  The orange is the second most reliable, because the Southern Baptist Convention allowed ministers to send in post cards to update their information if they had moved between December and May.  They also actively checked the Baptist publications for updated information.  The green, then, is the most unreliable, because each American Baptist Year-book relied solely on association minutes, relied on the information from the last minutes they received near the end of the previous year, and just republished prior information if no new information had been sent in.  In addition, as we will see when I insert the next half of the chart, much of the information they contain simply cannot be true.  

So, looking at the 1800s, we see confirmation that Erasmus was in San Saba County in 1882.  I already know that this meshes with the tax records.  The fact that he is reported as being in Clio in the 1883 book indicates that he was also in Brown County by the end of that year, which also matches what the tax records have to say.  Then, it shows that he was in the town of Clio through 1886, at which point he moved over to the town of May, where he remained for the rest of the decade.  The other two publications confirm that he was in May during the last two years of the century.

1899	May, Brown Co., TX	(Brown County, TX)	May, Brown Co., TX *
1900	May, Brown Co., TX
1901	May, Brown Co., TX	Emma, Crosby Co., TX
1902	May, Brown Co., TX	Emma, Crosby Co., TX *
1903	Emma, Crosby Co., TX		Emma, Crosby Co., TX*
1904	Emma, Brown Co., TX
1905	Bangs, Brown Co., TX
1906	Bangs, Brown Co., TX
1907	Bangs, Brown Co., TX Grouse, Wallowa Co., OR
1908	Bangs, Brown Co., TX Grouse, Wallowa Co., OR
1909	Bangs, Brown Co., TX Enterprise, Wallowa Co. OR
1910	Bangs, Brown Co., TX St. Johns, Multnomah Co., OR		Rotan, Fisher Co., TX *
1911	Bangs, Brown Co., TX	Rotan, Fisher Co., TX
1912	Bangs, Brown Co., TX
1913	Bangs, Brown Co., TX
1914		Bangs, Brown Co., TX

(I don't know why this put a bold header line at the top of this portion of the chart.  Just ignore it!  Also, I repeated the year 1899 to show that the Southern Baptist Annual actually reported Erasmus' name in the 1900 book, but that means that he could have been there in 1899 or also up to May of 1900.  That's why I placed those entries in a double box.)

Here is where we start to see problems with the information presented to us.  By the second year of the new century, we start to get seemingly conflicting information.  However, if we remember the way each book does the reporting, we can see that those first few entries don't actually conflict at all.  If the green column indicates status as of the previous year, and the red column indicates status as of November of the current year, that would mean that Erasmus remained in the town of May through part of 1901 before moving on to Emma.  

The problem comes in down in the 1905 row, because the green entry would mean that Erasmus had returned to Bangs in 1904, which he apparently did not, but the orange column reports that he was in Emma at least until the end of that year and maybe longer.  

What should we make of that?  Well, what if somebody sent in some updated information to the publishers of The American Baptist Year-book just before publication?  By 1904, the book no longer claims to be accurate; instead, it apologizes for not being up-to-date and for being published so late.  It blames the latter on the fact that many states didn't hold their annual convention until November, December, or in one case even, January, and some of those minutes weren't received until February.  What if the information that the church historian I mentioned several weeks back got from the records of the original Baptist church at Emma was wrong, and Erasmus did not actually serve as the pastor there into 1905?   I found something that I was saving for later, but I think we should actually take a peek at it now:

The Crosby County News
28 April 1916

The date of the old newspaper isn't reported, but it did say that it contained a marriage announcement from May 3, 1905.  That means that it was probably published within a week of that date.  Nearly all the way at the bottom it says that E. M. Owens was pastor of the Baptist church.  Huh.  I wonder if this is where the historian from First Baptist Church of Ralls (formerly Emma) got her information, or if it was in the church records.  I'm thinking not the church records, because I also found this on The Portal to Texas History:

A History of Crosby County
1876-1977

Dick Owen, huh?  That is sooooooo weird.  Especially because it was discovered that the church records had "been lost" and had to be reconstructed only two years after Erasmus left!   Perhaps Erasmus Miller Owen hated his first name.  I mean hated his first name, and that is why he always used his initials since the very first time we find him in the records - at the time of his marriage as a young man.  Perhaps the only reason he is found on the census with his actual first name is because his wife or one of his children gave the report to the census-taker.  Perhaps he wouldn't even tell other people what the "E. M." stood for, and so people just gave him nicknames . . . like Dr. Joe . . . and . . . Dick.   Maybe???

Anyway, we already knew that there was some discrepancy in the records over when exactly he ended his tenure in Emma.  Maybe the situation was even less cut-and-dry than we thought; maybe he already knew in December of 1904 that he was going to resign from the church in Emma soon and move in with his son Conrad, but hadn't yet, and the newspaper reporter from the Goldthwaite Eagle reported things wrong when it said he was already "late of Emma," and then Erasmus resigned from the church in Emma in say, February, but didn't move in with Conrad yet because Conrad's wife had just given birth to their first child, so he spent a short time with his daughter in Bangs and somebody reported in the Baptist records that he was there, and the reason he was listed in the Crosby County newspaper as still being the pastor in the month of May is because the church had prepaid for the listing and so they just kept printing it even though it was no longer true.  

Maybe?????

Anyway, looking back up at the chart, we can see that from 1905 onward, Erasmus is listed in the town of Bangs, even though for four of those years he is also listed in Oregon.  Based on the red and orange columns, I would say that it is safe to assume that, even though Erasmus was living in Brown County on the 1910 census, he spent all of 1911 and a good portion of 1910 in Rotan (Fisher County).  And, if I am interpreting the word "pastor" correctly as it is used in the Southern Baptist annuals, he was actually pastor of the Baptist church there in those years.  

Since we can't really trust the later entries from the green column, we can't be sure from these records where Erasmus was after 1911 - except for the year 1914, when he was certainly back in Bangs (Brown County).  Luckily, his pension application, dated December of 1913, stated that he had been back in Brown County for one year, so that would imply that he actually stayed in Rotan through 1912, but perhaps just not as the pastor of the church, which would explain why he wasn't listed in the Southern Baptist annual (it listed pastors; a different man was named).   

It just dawned on me that Erasmus' daughter Clara (with whom he would have been living in Rotan) would have been entering the third trimester of pregnancy at the end of 1912, and since she was already thirty-nine years old and had a two-year-old and six-year-old with only a ten-year-old daughter as help, probably did not need an additional person to care for at that time, which would explain why he moved back in with his daughter Minnie in Bangs.

I know where he was in 1916 (I'll share later!), and we know where he died, so that just leaves us with the year 1915 to try to figure out.  I'll leave you today with a look at the latter portion of Erasmus' timeline:

What we had the last time we looked at it:

And this is what we have now:

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese