Going down the Rabbit Hole

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 2

I had an epiphany last week.  I now know why it is so time consuming to write a family history/genealogical research blog:

It's those darn rabbit holes I keep going down.

Last week, while trying to find Erasmus Miller Owen in the 1900 Census records, I went down one of those holes.

You see, great great whatever grandpa doesn't turn up in any search results on Ancestry for that year, and it seems that nobody has managed to come across him with manual footwork either, so I decided to give it a try myself.  I looked through all of the pages of the census where he had been living last - Brown County, Texas: nope.  I looked through the pages of the places where his children were living that year - Jones County, Fisher County, Kent County: nope.  I looked where I had previously found some mentions of them online: no again.  I looked at maps of surrounding counties and tried there: also no.  I gave up for a bit, and decided that I had opened way too many tabs and had better close some of them:

(See?  That's what research looks like.)  So there I was, trying to eliminate some of the 47 tabs I might not really need open anymore, when I came to one from FamilySearch that needed me to sign in again before it would show me what was there.  Wouldn't you know, it was the main search page to look up books.  I don't even remember ever going to that page, and actually, I don't remember there even being such a page, which is probably why it was just sitting open on my computer - so I wouldn't forget that I should try it out.  So what do you think I did?  I gave it a try, of course.

And that's when I went down the rabbit hole.

I entered the search term "E. M. Owen".  The first few hits were for an E. M. Owen who had lived in Arkansas.  As far as I know, that was not our guy.  So I scrolled down the page and saw this:

FamilySearch Digital Library search results for E. M. Owen

Down at the bottom there we can see a reference to Erasmus Miller Owen and his first wife.  Luckily, this book (manuscript?) had no copyright restrictions so I was able to view it and download it too.  Woohoo!  I took a quick look and it had some very interesting things in it.  Things that were so interesting, I no longer had any doubt as to the veracity of the information concerning said marriage.  (I have as yet been unable to find an actual copy of the marriage record, and am always skeptical of information gleaned from indexes and databases.)  Anyway, as I said, I downloaded the entire document and saved the relevant pages as jpgs for future use, and said to myself, maybe we'll get to that in the next post and then I moved on.

The next thing I came across that looked like it had information about our E. M. Owen was a journal article about the history of Hale County, Texas:

Now that looked promising!  E. M. Owen preaching at a newly organized church/association?  In a place that I hadn't thought to look, but sat just one county over from Crosby County, the place where I found the Reverends E. M. Owen and Erasmus Owen in 1903 and 1904?

Wait.  I guess I never told you about that.  So, way back on like my first day of research, I was doing some investigating into whether or not Erasmus Miller Owen's son, Erasmus (Uncle Ras to most of us) was ever a preacher after the infamous kick to his head - we'll have a whole post about that quest!  So, my general Google search turned up a page on one of those genealogy sites like TexasGenWeb or something, which had a list of Crosby County marriages and it said that they were performed by those two Owen ministers.  I tried looking up the names of the bride and groom in an Ancestry search with no luck.  I also tried looking them up in a FamilySearch search, also with no luck.  So, of course, I pulled up the Crosby County marriage book on Familysearch and went through every single marriage license, looking at the name of the person who performed the marriage.  This is what I found:

Crosby County Marriage Book, vol. 1 pg. 51

Crosby County Marriage Book, vol. 1 pg. 55

So.  This just goes to show that those search algorithms aren't worth the paper - oh wait, the use of paper has gone by the wayside, hasn't it?

Anyway, Erasmus Miller Owen performed a marriage in Crosby County in August of 1904.  Now, for those of you who are new to my blog, you will soon discover that I am very fond of maps.  Here's one we should look at:

Map of Crosby County, Texas (1911)

You can see that Crosby County is just to the west of Dickens County, where Erasmus Miller Owen's son Sam lived for many years later on.  In 1904, Sam and his family were living in Kent County, which is just south of Dickens.  And right up there attached at the NW corner of Crosby, we find Hale.  Well, maybe the E. M. Owen mentioned in that history of Hale County that I found really is our guy.  Oh, what's that you ask?  Why didn't I just read it and find out?  Well, in case you didn't notice, next to the word "ACCESS LEVEL" in the entry was the word "protected."  Apparently, due to copyright issues, nobody is allowed to read it online.  Lovely.  

Of course, not to be deterred so easily, I tried to locate another copy online, maybe on the JStor research website or the Internet Archive or something.  I spent an entire hour trying to track a copy down . . . with no success whatsoever.  I even tried looking for Hale County newspapers, but apparently there are no digitized copies prior to 1908, and those are on some Texas university website with no easy way to do a keyword search.

I thought that trying to read through those would be even worse than looking at every single surname on every single page of the 1900 census records for Hale County.  Which is right about what I was ready to do when I had one more idea to try in order to discover if this was the right man or not.  The little blurb on the search results mentioned a Reverend Q. Brown and the Pendleton's Church Manual.  I managed to find the Rev. Brown in a different publication about Hale County, Texas, and he was a Baptist minister.  The manual in question was also about running meetings in Baptist churches.  So, since we know that Erasmus Miller Owen was a Baptist preacher, I'm pretty confident that he is the one this journal article is referring to.  (Now, if I could just get my hands on a copy of the actual journal in question!)

So then, after some four hours of mostly fruitless research, and even though I had no idea in what year E. M. Owen preached the first sermon on the day on which the formation of some association or other took place, I was finally ready to read through the 1900 census for Hale County.

Luckily, there were only 35 pages to look at, because I didn't find him there, either.  

So then I did what I always do when I seem to be at a dead end: I tried another Google search.  This time, I entered the terms "E. M. Owen" and "Baptist", thinking maybe some sort of record of the aforementioned event would miraculously pop up.  It didn't (of course!), but what did pop up were multiple editions of The American Baptist Year-Book.  And do you know what that led to?

You guessed it - another rabbit hole.  

After four more hours and nine pages of notes in my research journal, I knew the supposed whereabouts of Erasmus Miller Owen from his conversion to a Baptist minister until the year of his death.  And guess where he was reported to have been in 1903?  In the town of Emma, which was located in . . . that's right, Crosby County.  Unfortunately, he wasn't on the 1900 census for that location either.  So . . . . I went back to FamilySearch to see if there were any original records from Crosby County that could help, but there weren't, so I went back to Google to see if there was a history of the county that could help, and there wasn't, but I did find a book that said the Baptist association minutes have all the answers I am looking for, so I did another search to see if they were digitized and online, which I so far haven't found, but I did find the archives at Baylor University which includes a bunch of editions of the Baptist Standard newspaper, which gave me more than 2500 hits for the name Owen, and the very fourth one I looked at was about Erasmus Miller Owen's son Edgar.

And now, I have a grand total of 63 tabs open on my computer, and am in the middle of something like eight different lines of inquiry.  

Sigh.  That's research for you.

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese

 

Switching Gears

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 1

Well, here we are, nearly an entire year since I published my last post.  Things have been really, really busy!  I have actually conducted quite a bit of research during the past eleven months, and I have even written the drafts of six different blog posts, but I never managed to finish any of them before I had to switch gears and work on a different topic.  

When I published my last blog post back in August of 2022, I was working on the Cheatham side of my family, researching the maternal line of my great-great-grandmother, Amelia Virginia Blackshear Cheatham.  I was trying to trace back from her great-grandfather, John Moore, which turned out to be an enormously complicated endeavor.  I actually spent a year working on that research, and am nowhere close to figuring things out - probably because it is an impossible task - but I'm not one to give up, so I'll eventually get back to it.  (But even though I haven't solved any of the many research questions arising from that quest, I did discover some great information about the early Quakers, the settlement of North Carolina and what things were like there during the 1700s, and some very cool information about the colony's attitude during the Revolutionary War.  And, it turns out that much of what I did learn is actually relevant to other branches of my family as well, since it seems that a great many of my ancestral lines made their way through North Carolina at some point during the 1700s.) 

Over this past year, my sister and I have been helping our mother with the daunting task of organizing and archiving my grandmother's photo collection.  This has required me to jump from one branch of the family to another, collecting information about the members of each family group, including where they lived, when they lived there, who they married, and who their children were.  So now I have a lot of scattered notes, a gazillion random files saved to my computer  . . .  and six unfinished blog posts.

Part of the reason it takes me so long to write a post (two weeks plus revision and editing!!) is that I start with research questions that are too broad.  I have basically been trying to track and illustrate each ancestor's life with as much reliable evidence as I can find.  The results are usually amazing, but it takes a very, very, very long time.  Not only do I have to read through thousands of pages of old deed books and court records, but I also conduct extensive historical research in order to make sense of what I've found and put it all into context.  I've tried to shorten my posts in the past - alas with no success! - but I've got a new plan for moving forward:

I am just going to write a post each weekend about whatever I managed to work on during the preceding week.  Do I think it will work?  Who knows?  Do I think the posts will be a mess?  Maybe.  Will the information I gather and present be disjointed and random and stop right in the middle of things getting good and then everyone will have to wait another week for the grand conclusion?  Probably.  But we'll see how it works out.  After all, I had two goals when I started this blog: first, to share with the family the primary source documents and "life stories" that I turn up during my research, and second, to share what the research process is like, so that when I say something crazy like "so that particular family story has now been proven wrong . . . ", you can either be confident that I've done my homework and am probably right, or you can point out that there is a critical flaw in my reasoning!

Anyway, the research process is messy and disjointed, and it requires jumping from one place/topic/person to another, so if that's what my posts turn out like, well, so be it.  Hopefully we will all enjoy those aha! moments that come up along the way.

So.  Let's actually get to the fun stuff, shall we?

Since my sister and I are currently working on the Owen photo book, today we are going to be talking about Erasmus Miller Owen (the earliest ancestor on that side that anybody can actually recall and for whom we have a photo!) and his children.  He had fourteen of them, you know, and some of them had a whole lot of kids too, so there are a lot of his descendants out there putting stuff up on Ancestry and whatnot.  We are going to begin wading through all of that information and combine it with my own research and see if we can't pull it all together to create a cohesive picture of this branch of the family.  

Oh!  And one more thing before we begin: When I first signed up on Ancestry, years and years ago, I was like, who cares about all of those brothers and sisters and uncles and cousins?  Then I started delving deep into the research and discovered that all of those people can be very important to telling a person's story.  For example, I discovered that my great great grandfather, W. C. Cheatham, moved from one frontier county to another all across Texas during his adult life, making a stop in New Mexico before ending up in Arizona.  It turns out that his mother's brother and his sons could be found alongside him every step of the way almost to the end.  (I actually discovered this much later, when trying to identify an unknown female in one of the photos in the Cheatham photo book.)  It also turns out that all of them, W. C. Cheatham included, were carpenters.  Who knew?!  So not only can we can make a pretty good guess about at least one factor that drew them ever westward, but we can also see how important his mother's side of the family was to him.  I also discovered that his third child, Mary Frances, was most likely named for his father's first cousin, Francis Marion (who appears to have been very close to W. C.'s father),  and that his third son, Calvin Malone, was named for both his father and his wife's brother, who unexpectedly shows up in the newspaper records living in the town of Buffalo Gap alongside them at the time the child was born.

All of that is to say that we will be looking at the siblings (and maybe other relatives) of Erasmus Miller Owen and his daughter, Clara Owen Maben, because their comings and goings will most likely be an important part our direct ancestors' life stories too.

In case any of you are not quite sure who Erasmus Miller Owen was, and how he might relate to you, here is a little tree showing my relationship to him:

So, that makes him my great-great-great-grandfather, which means that for most of you reading this, he will either be your great-great-great-grandfather as well, or maybe your great-great-grandfather, or maybe, for those of you who are our next generation of genealogists/family historians, even your great-great-great-great-grandfather instead.  (Funny how, after researching him for just a few weeks now, he doesn't seem to have lived so long ago as that!)

On a side note, you'll notice that I the put maiden names of married women in italics.  This is how genealogists used to do it when they published books back during the first half of the 20th century.  I don't know why it fell out of general use, because it is a super helpful way to distinguish a maiden name from a middle name that also happens to be a family name, like in the case of Clara's daughter, Clarice Willson Maben.  I am going to continue to do that throughout this blog to avoid any confusion.

And here is a photo of Erasmus Miller Owen so you can see just who it is we are talking about:

Erasmus Miller Owen
c. 1900

(For those of you who have not read any of my previous posts, I would like to add a little disclaimer:  I am not responsible for the faulting formatting in this or any other blog post.  It is 100% the fault of the blogger template, and try as I might, I can't figure out how to fix it.  It has a mind of its own.  Not only does it mess up any chart I try to insert and not let me place things where I want, but the place where I put things in my draft is not even always the place where it shows up once it has been published.  And don't even get me started about my attempts to place a grid of images . . . . How about we all just ignore anything that looks strangely out of place or not well-thought-out?)

Okay, so who exactly was Erasmus Miller Owen, and was that really his name?

The simple answer is, "He was Grandma Maben's father."  Of course, that wasn't all that I was looking for, so when I began looking into the man, I started where I always start - my grandmother's Family History book.

Some of you may be aware that my grandmother, Ruth Goldie Cheatham, compiled a massive family history book for each of her children and grandchildren in the 1980s.  The type-written version of the book has 59 pages of text, along with 75 pages of photos, plus family data sheets for every family group mentioned, going all the way back to the 1500s.  The information in the book came from all over the place - genealogical research done by herself and others (including looking at census records and visiting cemeteries), family stories, and interviews with extended family across the country.  All of her research was conducted before the advent of the internet. (Remember this, because it will be important!) 

This is what her family data sheet for Erasmus Miller Owen looks like:

Family Data Sheet for Erasmus Miller Owen

Now do you see what I mean about his name?  She has written "Joe?" at the end of it.  It turns out that there is a bit of confusion about this.  Obviously, our line of his descendants never referred to him as "Joe."  But, if you look at other people's trees out there on the internet, you will see people calling him "Joseph Erasmus Miller Owen" or "Erasmus Joseph Miller Owen."  Hmmmm.

This is very interesting because everyone also likes to point out that in the 1850 census, all of his siblings' names start with the letter "E."  I think, then, that if those were indeed his siblings, that his first name wouldn't have actually been "Joseph."  (Unless . . . it seems like a lot of my ancestors actually called their kids by their middle names . . . . we will have to look into that.)  But why do I say that there could be some doubt that those are his siblings?  Well, here is the census page in question:

1850 U. S. Federal Census
Shelby County, Tennessee

If you look down to the second to last family on the page, you see a group of Owen children in the household of William C. Moore.  Notice that Erasmus is not one of those children.  Apparently he has not been found in any census record for that year.  Everybody just has this record attached to him in their trees.  I looked and looked for him on the 1850 census, and I didn't find him either, so I also have this record attached to his tree as a reminder to keep looking for him!  

Here is how Erasmus Miller is listed on the 1860 census:

1860 U. S. Federal Census
Burnet County, Texas

  

Okay.  He is listed as "E. M. Owens."  (Those old-timey record keepers couldn't seem to keep it straight whether a person's last name was "Owen" or "Owens".  I have looked at enough records now to just ignore the mistakes.)  

And the 1870 census:

1870 U. S. Federal Census
San Saba County, Texas

Hmmm.  Here he is listed as "Erasmus Owen".

How about 1880?

1880 U. S. Federal Census
San Saba County, Texas

Once again, he is listed as "Erasmus Owen".

1890?  Nope.  There is no 1890 census for like 99% of the country, courtesy of a 1921 fire in the records building.  And wouldn't you know, none of my ancestors lived in the 1% (or something like that) of records that actually survived.  So, on to the 1900 census:

Well, he is nowhere to be found on the 1900 census either.  The 1910 census is the last one we have before his death:

1910 U. S. Federal Census
Brown County, Texas

Okay.  So Erasmus M. Owen.  Not once do we see him on the census records with the name "Joseph" attached.  I have actually looked at a considerable number of records for the man during the past two weeks, and never once in all of that time have I come across a primary source document for him that has his name shown as Joseph or Joe or even the initial J.

So where did that idea come from?

The first place I saw it was in the Owen Family Association newsletter.  Some of you may be familiar with this.  Back in 2011, a woman who was the great-granddaughter of Erasmus Miller Owen's son Sam submitted biographical sketches of Sam, Erasmus Miller, and his father, Bluett.  I don't know if the association is still around, but it appears that the newsletter is now defunct.  You can still find issues online from a Latter Day Saints dropbox website, here.  (There is no download button, so you will have to print to pdf to save a copy for yourself.)

This is what the newsletter reported about Erasmus Miller Owen:

Owen Family Association Newsletter
Volume 24 Issue 2, June 2011

Ah. This says, "Some biographies state Erasmus attended medical school for two years in New Orleans, leading to his nickname, "Dr. Joe."  He would become a circuit riding preacher, ministering to souls and physical ailments."

Interesting.  So apparently the idea that he was named Joseph comes from the nickname he supposedly had: Dr. Joe.  And that nickname comes from the idea that he had attended medical school and then ministered to people's physical ills while he was a circuit riding preacher.  I see.  Well, it sounds like the author did her research.  She is also a pretty good writer, so I am guessing she is well-educated and intelligent enough to critically sift through the evidence she had gathered before compiling her own biography of Erasmus Miller Owen.  So when she writes "Some biographies state . . . ." I take that to mean that she not only has been unable to confirm the validity of those claims, but also that she is acknowledging that not all branches of the family have passed down the same story.

So where did the story originally come from?

From one of Erasmus' grandsons, apparently.  There is a woman who married a grandson or great-grandson (sorry, I don't remember which!) of Erasmus Miller Owen's son Edgar, and she posted on Ancestry a transcript of a letter from Edgar's son Leon to his sister Leta:

Letter from Leon Edgar Owen to 
his sister, Leta Byrd
Ancestry.com

This letter is interesting for a number of reasons.  First, so we can get it out of the way, Leon names three of Erasmus Miller's brothers:  Elijah, Elisha, and "one with a Bible name that nobody could pronounce" but who was called "Lep."  This third brother lived near Leander, and I looked him up, and that would have been Eliphelet Owen.  He was one of those children on the 1850 census I showed you up above.  So that confirms that those were the siblings of Erasmus Miller Owen.  The other two, who were twins, show up living in the household of another family in that year.  This is a promising development, because it will help us when we decide to go backwards in Erasmus' life story.

The second interesting thing is that it says Erasmus "went to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he studied medicine and he was called Dr. Joe in San Saba Co before he quit practicing medicine."

Okay.  Leon Owen was born in 1896, which means that he would have been about 20 years old when his grandfather died.  That means that he probably had family visits with his grandfather in the years when he was old enough to at least vaguely remember any stories he told.  And, the fact that he knew something about his grandfather's brothers and and their children means that the members of this branch of the family weren't strangers to him.  The letter is undated, but if you look into the clues, you can determine that it was written in approximately 1950, which would have made Leon old enough to have gotten fuzzy on some details, but not old enough for him to have completely misremembered things.

And this is where my new system of writing blog posts becomes a problem:  in my old system, I would dive right in and investigate those discrepant claims about medical school and (hopefully) use that information to determine how much faith we can put into the whole "Dr. Joe" thing.  But you know what?  That is going to make this short post turn into a very long post, so I am going to have to end here, even though it seems somewhat abrupt.

So, to sum up what we learned today - Erasmus Miller Owen was the father of Clara Owen Maben.  We don't find him in the census records until 1860, and then we see him in Texas for the next 50 years.  We know that his name was Erasmus Miller   . . . . um, come to think of it, how do we even know that the "M" stood for Miller?  It is not spelled out in a single one of the census records.  I guess I got that idea from looking at my grandmother's family history book and the labels on the backs of the old photos.

Ugh.  I feel like we should continue this line of inquiry a bit longer.

And this is where I would like to throw out a word of caution: Don't be one of those people who find all kinds of cool stuff on Ancestry and just stick it to your tree and never look at it again.  I don't usually do that.  I mean, I do find a whole bunch of cool stuff and I do stick it to my tree, but I usually take my time (like a whole year!) to look at one single person, and during that time I go back and look at all of the cool stuff that I stuck to my tree and I research it and I write about it and then I feel like I actually knew that person even though they lived fifty, or one hundred, or even two hundred years before I was even born.

Unfortunately, since I have been forced to keep a furious pace of research while working on the photo project, I haven't yet been able to go back and look at everything I've found.  Until just now.  Just now I went to my tree and noticed that I have a whole bunch of death certificates attached.  The death certificates are from Erasmus Miller Owen's children.  Death certificates always ask for the names of the father and mother of the deceased.  And then I remembered that I had looked at somebody else's tree that had a death certificate for Erasmus himself, but it was like 11:00 pm and Ancestry was doing maintenance and it wouldn't let me attach it to my tree, and I guess I accidentally closed that tab and I guess I didn't bookmark it either (it was 11 pm, folks!) but luckily I turned up a copy with only ten minutes of searching (it was indexed wrong, so a quick easy search turned into an oh look! I accidentally found it again! search.  

Okay!  Let's look at those, then!  But you know what?  The man had so many children that doing so will also turn this short post into a long one.  So, I think we will push that to next time.  Holding off until next week is also a great idea, because we can chart his movements across Texas at the same time - one of my favorite things to do, because not only does it help tell a person's story, but it lets me put up lots and lots of maps!

Yay!  I'm going to get started on that right now . . . and I guess we'll get back to the whole medical school thing after that . . . .

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese