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