Surprise, Surprise

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 5

Now that we've gotten the whole name issue resolved, let's start looking at Erasmus Miller Owen's movements across Texas.  I've started to collect an awful lot of place information for him, and I'd better get a timeline started so that I can keep it all straight.  We're going to try to pull the whole mess together, but I'm not sure what the most logical way of doing that would be.  If I had started writing my posts on Day One of my research, I could have just thrown everything at you when I found it, and we could all have said Whaaat??? or Aaaaahh together as we got collectively confused or suddenly gained an understanding of what was going on.  As it is, I've got a random jumble of documents and secondary source information, and I don't think there's a great way to do this without jumping around between sources - or even topics - but let's give it a go and see what happens. 

I'm going to put up a document right off the bat.  These are the first two pages of Erasmus' Confederate Pension Application:

Erasmus Miller Owen
Confederate Pension Application
(pages 1 & 2)

(You can enlarge this by clicking on the caption.)  I love these sorts of documents because they are so full of information.  From these two pages we can learn:

Erasmus was born in Shelby County, Tennessee.
He arrived in Texas on December 25, 1849.
He turned 81 years old on April 28, 1913, which means that he was born in 1832.
On December 24, 1913 Erasmus was living in the town of Bangs, in Brown County, Texas.
He had moved to Brown County for the first time in 1882.
He had "made several visits to children in other Texas counties" but had lived in Brown Co. for the past year.
Erasmus was a minister, but had become feeble and was no longer working.
He did not own his own home.

Oh, so many clues!  This gives us a nice framework to start a timeline.  We'll take a look at this document again later, when we talk about his military service.  For now, let's switch over to the census records.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I haven't found Erasmus Miller Owen on the 1850 census.  I decided to look for other Owens on Ancestry and see if I could find anything that might help me out.  I didn't, but I did get a hit for the 1850 non-population schedule of the census, which I didn't have attached to my tree yet.  I clicked on the link and was given this document:

U. S. Federal Census Agricultural Schedule
Burnet County, Texas
Ancestry.com

This shows, down on line 32, that Erasmus was farming in Burnet County in 1850.  If you remember, this is where we found him and his family living on the 1860 census.  But let's take another look at his bio from the Owen Family Association Newsletter:

Owen Family Association Newsletter
Volume 24 Issue 2, June 2011

(I apologize for the poor quality of this image - I don't know why it does that when you save something as a pdf.)

Let's skip down to the third paragraph.  It tells us that we know Erasmus was in San Saba County in 1856 because he registered one of the first cattle brands there in that year.  (That was the same year the county was formed out of Bexar County.)  I found this information in a 1946 article from the Southwestern Historical Quarterly titled "A Sketch History of San Saba County, Texas" by Alice Gray Upchurch:

I haven't come across an actual primary source record showing this registration of his brand; Ms. Upchurch lists Deed Book I as one of her sources, so I think that is probably where it can be found, but Familysearch doesn't have any of the San Saba County deed books online.  Not a single one.  Not even an index.  I think a person has to actually go down to the San Saba county clerk's office to look at them.  Of course, it could have also been mentioned in the county court minutes, because that is where I found mention of who registered a mark or brand in Hyde County, North Carolina, but the actual brands themselves weren't there; I've seen mention of brand books before, so maybe that existed in San Saba County as well.  

But guess what?  None of that is online.  Not only that, but I couldn't even find any mention of deeds on the San Saba County Clerk's Office website.  It was sooooo weird; probably the least helpful government website I've ever found.  Now, the Bexar County website - they really have their act together.  You can look up everything online, all the way back to when Texas became a state. (When I hit the brick wall in San Saba, I tried Bexar in case he was already there before San Saba was officially split from it.  Of course, I found several Owens, but not our Owen.)

Now, we are going to jump forward for a moment and then jump back again.  In the 1870 census, Erasmus and his family were living in . . . . San Saba County.   So, what we have is:

1850 - Burnet County

1856 - San Saba County

1860 - Burnet County

1870 - San Saba County

That doesn't sound right.  Why would he be going back and forth and back and forth?  Now, that isn't too terribly strange because Burnet County bordered San Saba County:

Colton's Map of Texas, 1856

Okay, I know I did a terrible job of outlining those counties - my hands just don't work the way they used to.  Also, this is not the best map, but it IS a map from 1856, which is exactly what I wanted.  San Saba County is outlined in red, and Burnet County is to the southeast, outlined in yellow.  So, the two counties are connected right there at the bottom.  Not a lot of overlap.  But it doesn't matter all that much, because Erasmus and his family were not really going back and forth and back and forth.  According to the records, they actually only did that once.  

Now, I know some of you want to say What are you talking about?  But listen - back when I was researching a different branch of my family, I came across the same problem.  My third great-grandfather, Silas Blackshear, was shown on the 1850 regular census as living in Arkansas.  On the 1850 agricultural form, he was in Anderson County, Texas.  Then, in 1860, he was in . . . . Anderson County, Texas.  That had me tripped up for quite awhile.  Like, for four or five successive blog posts!  And then I decided that there must be some mistake, so I went back and looked at all of the pages from the 1850 non-population schedule for Anderson County on Ancestry.  None of the pages had a date at the top, and all years from 1850 through 1880 were in the same database.  I suspected that maybe the 1850 pages weren't really all 1850 pages.  So I wrote down every name on the agricultural page in order, and compared it to every name on the regular census pages in order, and compared those to the 1850 and 1860 slave schedule names - in order - and discovered that the names on the erroneously labeled agricultural schedule very closely matched the names (in order, mind you) on the 1860 census, but not so much the 1850 census.  So an hour of data collection proved that Ancestry had made a mistake, and also that my ancestor was not living in Arkansas and farming in Texas at the same time!

This one doesn't require all of that legwork, though, and do you know why?  Because Burnet County wasn't even formed until 1852, so it could not have had a non-population schedule for 1850.  If you go to the image on Ancestry, there is a drop-down menu at the top of the page, and for 1860 it has no county choices alphabetically before Cass County, even though there should have been a ton of counties beginning with the letters A and B in that year.  There are four pages for San Saba County labeled 1860, but Erasmus isn't shown on any of them.  Why?  Because he was in Burnet during that year!  So the timeline should actually look like this:

1850 - whereabouts unknown

1856 - San Saba County

1860 - Burnet County

1870 - San Saba County

For some reason, Erasmus and his family were living in Burnet County in 1860.  How long before then they moved, and how long after that they stayed, we don't know.  (I'd like to say we don't know yet, because I'm not very good at letting such things go!)  But, I can't help asking why they were in Burnet County in 1860.  According to the Owen Family Association Newsletter, Erasmus' first wife, Mary Ann Carr, died in 1858, and he married Rhoda Salome Eastman later in the same year.  I suspected that the move either had something to do with the second marriage, or perhaps even due to problems with the Comanche Indians. (We'll have a whole post on that later!)  I decided to do a search and see if I could find out where Rhoda's family was living in 1860.  

The 1860 census shows Rhoda's mother, four brothers, and a sister living in the town of Lampasas; according to other family trees, her father had died in 1860 (he wasn't on the mortality schedule for Lampasas, Burnet, or San Saba County).  The town of Lampasas is very near the southern border of Lampasas County (outlined in light brown on the map), which just so happens to also be the northern border of Burnet County.  I think my hunch is probably correct, then.  I thought that maybe Erasmus had met Rhoda while doing the circuit-riding-preacher thing, because I read in a book about the early years of Methodism in Texas that one of the circuits included parts of San Saba, Burnet, and Lampasas counties.  (I know we haven't talked about the Methodist/Baptist stuff - we'll get to that!)  But then I decided to check the tax rolls.  I love looking at tax rolls, which is why it's so funny that, every time I look into an ancestor's life, it doesn't occur to me right off the bat to use those records to track their movements!  (I'm going to go do that now.)

Okay. I looked at the Lampasas County tax rolls to see in what years Rhoda's family was living there.  Strangely, there were no Eastmans on the Lampasas tax rolls for 1858, 1859, or even 1860, when they showed up on the census!  They weren't on the rolls for 1861 either.  I thought that was weird, because Rhoda's older brother, Benjamin F. Eastman, was old enough that he should have been taxed.  Then I remembered that a couple of weeks ago I had started, but never finished, looking at the San Saba County tax rolls, and that is where I found B. F. Eastman in 1859 and 1860.  He didn't own any land, just one horse and 4 head of cattle in 1859, and nothing but miscellaneous property in 1860.  (He shows up again in 1867, still with no real estate but a relatively high value of miscellaneous personal property.)  The 1860 census showed his occupation as a "waggoner," which is kind of like a teamster, but can include a person who just gets paid by local farmers to drive horses in relation to planting or harvesting activities or to carry their produce to market.  I guess you wouldn't need property if you weren't farming.  And, I guess Rhoda's mother did not show up on the tax rolls because she was a woman who owned no property, which makes me think that Rhoda's father had also owned no property (I found him on tax rolls in 1848-1850 and he was not a property owner in those years).

Anyway, I've spent hours looking at tax rolls and don't seem to have gained any answers to the question of why Erasmus and his family were in Burnet County.  I did sort of get an answer as to how long they were there, though.  Erasmus Miller Owen is listed on the tax rolls of San Saba County for nearly every single year between 1855 and 1881.  (The rolls begin in 1856, but the assessor wrote in "for 1855" on some pages. I guess I need to fix that on the timeline.)  The only years he is missing are 1863, probably because the page with the N, O, and P names has been lost, and 1866.  (I have a guess where he may have been in that year; maybe we'll get to it later in this post!)  This means that the family wasn't in Burnet County for very long - less than a year, because he was still enumerated on the taxes for San Saba County in 1860 and 1861.

I also checked the Burnet County tax rolls, and Erasmus wasn't there.  But do you know who was?  Some other Owens, that's who.  In 1859 there was a John Owen and a W. M. Owen.  In 1860, there was W. M. Owen again, and also an E. A. Owen.  And, in 1861, there were those two men, plus a Joseph Owen.

It turns out that E. A. Owen was Erasmus' brother, Eliphalet.  (Okay, I must confess.  I am following this line of research while I am typing right now, and I was like, how will I ever find out what those initials actually stood for?  It barely occurred to me that if someone was on the tax rolls in a census year, it was likely that they would be on the census for the same place, so that is how I figured this out.  Silly me!)  Eliphalet was a 26 year-old stock raiser in 1860, and he was living with the C. C. Arnett family.  C. C. Arnett was actually named Cullen Curlee, and he was . . . . the uncle of Erasmus' wife Rhoda!  When I saw that E. A. Owen was in the Arnett household, my mind kept telling me "Mary B. Arnett, Mary B. Arnett" and I was like whose mother was that?  Rhoda's?  So I checked my tree and sure enough it was.  

(I haven't figured out yet who the John and Joseph Owen men were.  Neither one turned up with a quick check on the 1860 census.  There is a notation on the 1859 tax record that makes me think John Owen had died.  William M. Owen was a 48 year-old physician who was born in North Carolina.  His kids were born in Missouri and Texas.  One of his daughters shared a name with one of Erasmus' sisters.  So, a distant cousin, maybe?  Or possibly just a coincidence.)

And now do you want to hear something ridiculous?  It turns out that Erasmus and the Arnett family were living right next door to each other; maybe Erasmus was even living on their land, because they are listed as dwelling 222 and 223 on the census, but they are listed on two separate pages, so I never noticed this before!  (I just went back and checked the tax rolls for Burnet County in 1860, and wouldn't you know, there was C. C. Arnett on the very first page with 578 acres of land.)

But back to the tax rolls.  In 1860, Eliphalet is shown to have had no cattle, but 26 horses (valued at $1040).  Was he hiring cowboys and driving cattle for other stock raisers?  Or was he rounding up wild horses for sale?  Maybe he was rounding wild horses up, and then breaking them before selling them.  I came across some old PBS flash game online called "Texas Ranch House" which was kind of like the choose-your-own adventure thing (like the classic Oregon Trail game).  In the introduction it said that usually about a dozen cowboys would drive a herd of cattle, and that, because the horses had to work so hard, each cowboy needed six horses apiece!  By 1861, Eliphalet had sold the horses and was able to purchase 500 acres of land for only half the price his horses had been valued at.  Sounds like a profitable venture, right?

Now, we sort of got stuck at the not-1850 census and then this blog post sort of morphed before our eyes into something I didn't anticipate (that's research!), so I didn't mention what Erasmus' occupation was reported as.  Here is the census page:

1860 U. S. Federal Census
Burnet County, Texas

Erasmus reported his occupation as "Stock Raising."  I had read somewhere recently that a lot of the early stock-raisers were creating their herds by rounding up the feral cattle that were roaming around on the frontier.  If you paid attention to the map up above, you can see that San Saba County was about as close to the frontier as you could get.  According to The Western Range Revisitied, during the 1860s "stock-raising was touted not as a way of life, but as an 'adventure' or get-rich-quick scheme."  It wasn't until the financial collapse of 1885 that ranching began to be seen as a business.  (And, if any of you wants to learn more about early cattle drives in Texas, you can read this fantastic article on the Frontier Life website.) 

Oh!  I showed you the agricultural schedule up above, but we didn't talk about what it said either, because I was just trying to make a timeline!  That document recorded that Erasmus had no land - none improved, none unimproved, and none owned in Burnet County.  This makes sense considering that he was never on the tax rolls there.  So that tells me that he most likely was living on the Arnett's land at the time.  Hmmm.  We should look at what the agricultural schedule showed for C. C. Arnett.

1860 U. S. Federal Census Agricultural Schedule
Burnet County, Texas
Ancestry.com

Aha!  There they are right next to each other again.  (I didn't even notice that!)  Mr. Arnett had 100 acres of unimproved land and 488 acres improved, and, even though he reported his occupation as "Farmer," he had 75 head of cattle.  This schedule shows that Erasmus had 10 horses, 25 milk cows, 4 working oxen, and 20 head of cattle.  The top of the form says they were supposed to report what livestock they had on June 1st, and the rest of the form was supposed to show what they had produced in the whole preceding year, as opposed to the tax records which were supposed to show what they actually owned at the beginning of the year.  The 1860 tax records over in San Saba County showed that he owned 7 horses and 50 head of cattle.  So in six months' time he had gained three horses, but kept the total number of cattle pretty much the same.  Mr. Arnett, on the other hand, in addition to having a large herd of milk cows and other cattle, produced an awful lot of grain on his cultivated land; perhaps Erasmus was exchanging the use of his two teams of oxen for "rent" on the Arnett farm.

You know, this post is getting harder to write by the minute!  I keep wanting to talk about one thing, and then realize that I should probably talk about what these records actually show us, which I wasn't even going to do until later, but maybe it makes more sense to just do it now.  (Does it?)  Anyway, while checking the headings on this form, I noticed that the top right category says "PRODUCED IN THE."  Produced in the preceding year is what it is supposed to say, which reminded me that there is supposed to be a second page - this was a two-page spread!  So why do none of these include the second page?  Well, those are - for some reason unbeknownst to me - indexed under the drop-down menu titled "Saint George."  (Is that some secret code for "We have no idea where these pages actually belong"?)  So, I just discovered that the left-hand side of each spread has a page number on the left, but no year - hence the mis-indexing as 1850.  But the Saint George, a.k.a. right-hand page of each spread, has a page number on the right, and just below that it says "1860."  See?

1860 U. S. Federal Census Agricultural Schedule
Burnet County, Texas
Ancestry.com

Huh.  I guess I should go back and take another look at my other 3rd great grandfather's record!  I didn't put up the whole image of the first page, but you can use the Ancestry link in the caption to take a look if you want.  Or, if you aren't on Ancestry, you can view the page here instead.  Erasmus was listed on page 11, so I went and found page 12.  And I know that these two sets go together because both had eleven pages and the last page of the left-hand spread had only 12 names listed, and there was a matching page in the Saint George set (even though it was microfilmed in reverse!).

If we look down to line 32, which is where Erasmus was listed on the left-hand side, we can see that he hadn't focused much on farming the previous year.  The first page showed that he had produced only 15 bushels of wheat and no corn, which was less than most other farmers on the page.  This page shows that he put his 25 milk cows to good use, though, producing 150 pounds of butter - just under the average amount compared to the other families listed.  

But, back to the question we had before - why were Erasmus and his family in Burnet County?  Maybe Erasmus was there doing the stock raising thing.  Maybe he and his brother were meeting up to do a round-up or to drive his cattle along with others to market, and he wanted Rhoda and the children to be close to family who could help them out and keep them safe, maybe especially because the Comanches were rampaging across San Saba County at that time.  (I know that sounds terrible, but we will see in a subsequent post that it was happening from time to time.)  Maybe the move had something to do with Erasmus' preaching circuit.  Maybe it was because Rhoda was having a difficult pregnancy and wanted to be close to family.  I just looked more closely at where in Burnet the census placed them, and it was in the Burnet town postal district; after a half hour of research, I determined that, although the town of Burnet was in the center of the county, there were no other postal districts north of the town in 1860.  So, maybe staying with the Arnetts put Rhoda close to her aunt as well as to her mother.  And, since Erasmus' brother was living with Rhoda's aunt and uncle, they might have been killing two birds with one stone.  (Or three if Erasmus was preaching along the way!)  The census was enumerated on the 30th day of June, and their daughter Mary was supposedly born in December of that year, so maybe before June Rhoda was far enough along to suspect that there might be problems and the move was made.

Or how about this: While trying to find out exactly when Rhoda's father died, I looked at the 1860 mortality schedule for Burnet County:  

1860 U. S. Federal Census Mortality Schedule
Burnet County, Texas

(You won't find this on Ancestry because the way the mortality schedules were microfilmed is very confusing; this county has either been missed, included with the pages of another county, or filed into the wrong year.  I found it on FamilySearch, and if you click on the image caption it will take you to that page.)

The mortality schedule for Burnet County reported six infant deaths in the preceding year - all but one died within days of being born, and one was one month old.  All but one were unnamed.  The one who had been given a name was named Edgar Owens.  There were only three families with that last name on the census: our Erasmus, the physician William M. Owens, and Eliphalet, who was unmarried.  (All three had the last name spelled "Owens.")  That means that the infant Edgar was born to either Erasmus and Rhoda or to W. M. Owen(s) and his wife.

Now, today we tend to think that it would be weird for Erasmus to have had a baby named Edgar who died, and then later to name another son with the same name.  But maybe people didn't think it was creepy to do that back then.  Maybe families who named their children in honor of their grandparents and aunts and uncles and siblings thought it was perfectly normal to name a child in honor of their own lost brother or sister.  I mean, my great-grandmother Lula was named after her sister who had died as an infant.  If you look at Rhoda's sons, the first was named after her father, the second was named after Erasmus, and the third was named . . . Edgar.   

Also, doesn't it seem weird that two possibly unrelated Owens (which was not a very common last name in most of Texas at the time) would end up naming their sons the same, not-very-common first name?  And consider the fact that the four other babies who died were not given names; if anyone was going to name a one-day-old infant, I would think that it would be a minister who would do so.  Erasmus and Rhoda would have been married for almost two years by the time the 1860 census was taken.  The baby in question had died in December of 1859, which is late enough to have been theirs, and early enough for Rhoda to have been pregnant again by the following March.  What if it was the death of her first child that prompted them to move closer to family when Rhoda discovered that she was pregnant again?  Or what if they had moved closer to her family even earlier in 1860 to help her get through the grieving process?  

I tried looking at the age of W. M. Owen's wife Sarah to see if she was too old to have a child, and she was 43 years old.  I looked for statistics showing the average age at which a woman had her last child in the mid-1800s, and could only find a data set for the Mormon women in Utah.  There, the average age was 40.5.  Of course, that was an average age, so some would have been younger and some older.  I took a look at the women on the Burnet County census and found that most older women appeared to have had their last child within the range of 37 to 42 years old, but there were three women who had children at the ages of 45, 46, and even 50.  Now, of course some of those other women may have had a child who had died and wasn't listed on the census, but surely not all.  If we consider Sarah Owens, we find that her youngest child was six years old, meaning it would have been born when she was 37 years old.  That is at the bottom of the average range, so it is possible that was her last child.  It is also possible that she had a younger child, or even children, who had died for some reason.  But, her husband was a doctor, who would have been trained in obstetrics and the diseases of women and children, so . . . .

I don't think we have enough evidence to say who the infant Edgar belonged to, but there is a statistical 50/50 chance plus some reasonable arguments that (maybe?) make it even more likely that he was the child of Erasmus and Rhoda.  Perhaps this explains the uncertainty out there over which of Erasmus' wives was the mother of his daughter Rosemary, who died in infancy in 1848.  Many researchers say that Mary Ann died in childbirth and attribute that baby to her.  But others, like my grandmother, have recorded that Erasmus and Rhoda lost their first child as an infant, and name Rosemary as that child.  If the 1848 date that everybody records for Rosemary's birth and death is correct, she had to have been the child of Erasmus and Mary Ann, because Erasmus did not marry Rhoda until September of that year.  Perhaps the fact that Rhoda lost her first child has been remembered correctly, but the actual name of that child has been forgotten.  Perhaps that child was the infant Edgar.

And now I feel like one does when there has been twenty minutes of talking in a room and all of a sudden the conversation just dries up to nothing.  This post certainly took a turn from what I had planned, and although I hate to end things with an unsolvable mystery, I think it will be better to end here (I've spent a whole week on this post already!) and try to get back on track with the timeline next time.  Or, maybe we'll see what some of the memoirs I've rustled up can tell us about Erasmus' life in San Saba during the 1860s.  Either way, I'm sure I'll have some interesting things to share!

                                                                                                                                              - Therese