What's in a Name?

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 3

Two weeks ago, we began looking into the life of Erasmus Miller Owen.  Unfortunately, we didn't get any further than asking the question, "What, actually, was his name?"  We didn't even manage to answer that question, so that is where we are going to pick up today.

So far we have looked at the census records, all of which had some variation of Erasmus or Erasmus M.  Then we threw out the idea that maybe his name was really Joseph.  Today we are going to look at the death certificates of his children to see what those have to say.  But first, we should probably take a preliminary look at the kids themselves.  

According to the family data sheet I showed you last time, Erasmus had two children by his first wife (who we will talk about later): Ellen and Sam.  The family data sheet doesn't show any dates for their birth or death, nor does it make any mention of their spouses.  I guess my grandmother did this because they were the children of the first wife, and we are descended from the second wife.  But, once again, I am of the opinion that, if we are trying to tell the story of Erasmus Miller Owen, and not merely make a genealogical chart, both of the wives and all of the children are equally important.  If you have followed my blog in past years, you will know that whenever I finish researching an ancestor I make a new family data sheet and timeline with source citations for every fact, so I am going to take note of each "fact" and where it was found for later use.

Now, according to the family data sheet, Erasmus had twelve children with his second wife (who we will talk about later, too):  Rosemary, Jacob Richard, Erasmus, Letitia, Edgar, Minnie, Clara Eugenia, Mark, Conrad Luther, Leona, and Orlena.

(I wonder why some of the children had middle names and others didn't?)

Here is the death certificate for the oldest child, Ellen:

Death Certificate of Ellen Owen Shoultz Riggs

Just so you all know, when I entered this branch of the family onto my Ancestry tree, I spent quite a bit of time trying to confirm that this was actually the daughter of Erasmus Miller Owen.  Just to be sure.  I didn't just take the word of those Ancestry trees out there, because sometimes (or maybe I should say often) they get people confused.  

Now, some of you might not particularly care, but I am going to show you how I figured this out, because it is important.

Okay.  This death certificate is a bit bizarre, because it doesn't have a birthdate.  It just says "67."  I'm thinking that meant that she was 67 years old when she died.  That would put her birth at 1848, but Erasmus Miller didn't marry our Ellen's mother until 1852 (we will talk about that later).  Most trees place her birth in 1853, the year after her parents' marriage, but the article in the Owen Family Association Newsletter dates her birth to 1854.  (The grave marker for the Ellen in this document says 1843, which still would not add up to 67 years old, so it was probably meant to say 1848 and was carved incorrectly.)  So, could this possibly be our Ellen? 

On the 1860 census, our Ellen can be found in the household of Erasmus Miller Owen.  She was 6 years old.  In 1870, she was still living at home, and was 16 years old:

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

Then, in 1880, she was 26 years old and no longer in the household of Erasmus Miller Owen:

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

Instead, she was living right next door with her three sons, and was marked as "widowed."  Now, look back up at the 1870 census.  Look who was living right next door to Erasmus Miller Owen.  It was Tolbert Shultz, born in Wertemburg.  Tolbert does not appear on the 1880 census.  Now look at the names of Ellen's children - Samuel, Hensla, and Levi.  Hensla sure sounds like a German name, doesn't it?

It turns out that Hensla was actually named Erasmus Hense Shoults, and Levi was actually named Levi Tolbert Shoultz.  (I know I am not spelling the last name the same.  It appears that each had adopted a different spelling by their later life.)  So we have a German man with no children living next door to our Ellen's family in 1870, and ten years later we see Ellen living next door to her father with three children, one of whom has a definitely German name alongside the name Erasmus (Ellen's father), and the other has a middle name that is the same as that German man.  It looks to me like Tolbert Shoultz's first wife died some time after the 1870 census, and by the beginning of 1873 he had married our Ellen Owen (her oldest son was born at the end of that year).  Only two of the Shoultz boys have death certificates on Ancestry, and neither names a father, but the oldest boy's certificate names Ellen Owens as his mother.  The FindaGrave website biography for Hense says that he and his brothers were "raised by Ellen Riggs," but I'm pretty sure she was actually their mother.  

But, if you aren't convinced, just look at this photo of Hense compared to two of Ellen's half-brothers:

Hense Shoults,  Mark Owen,  Edgar Owen

I might be crazy, but the first thought that popped into my head when I came across the photo of Ellen's son was hey, he has that Owen chin!

Oh, and the one photo we have of Ellen says Ellen Shoults on the back:  

Ellen Owen Shoults Riggs and daughter (Ola?)

Anyway, the FindaGrave Ellen Owen Riggs is supposed to be the same woman as recorded in the death certificate above.  Is it the same person as our Ellen Owen Shoultz?  We don't have the 1890 census, and by 1900 we find Ellen with the last name "Riggs," and all three Shoultz boys are no longer in her household.  Instead, we find her in Ellis County, Texas with a different husband and the following children: Ola, Mary J., William, Ruby, and Fannie.  The informant on the death certificate above was named Willie Riggs, and all of Ellen's children who had the last name Riggs have Ellen Owen, Ellen Riggs, or just "Shultz" named as their mother's maiden name on their death certificates.  In addition, her last child (who was born in 1894) has a death certificate that states that both she and her mother were born in San Saba County, Texas.  (Ellen most likely wasn't, actually, but that is where she lived for much of her life before that time.) 

All of that was to show you that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to prove that Ellen Riggs was the name of Ellen Owen at the time of her death.  And her death certificate is just the final confirmation; when Ellen died in 1915, two years before her father, her son Willie reported that her father's name was "Jos Owens" and that her mother's name was "Estman."

Since Ellen was only about four years old or so when her own mother died, and by the time she was six her father had already married Rhoda Eastman, Rhoda was probably the only mother she remembered, and the only one any of her children would have met.  So that part makes sense.

And now for the really important part: her father.  The legend (can I call it that?) says that Erasmus Miller Owen was called Dr. Joe while he lived in San Saba County, Texas.  Ellen, being the oldest child, lived the most years in the time and place in question.  Wouldn't you think she would know better than anyone what his real name was?  Not only that, but (I am very sorry to say this) I have noticed throughout my years of research that it tends to be sons who get things like mother's maiden names (especially if she had been widowed at some point and then remarried) wrong.  And the daughters, especially the oldest daughters, tend to get things right.

Of course, Ellen herself did not do the reporting on her own death certificate, but her son Willie was in his late twenties when both his mother and grandfather died.  This means that he would have gotten his information from his mother, and quite possibly from his grandfather himself.  At the very least, he got it from listening to stories from his aunts and uncles, who one would also think should have known what their own father was named.  

Huh.  I guess that's one vote for Joseph then.

The next child in the family was Sam.  Unfortunately, we don't have a death certificate for him.  It looks like all but one of the death certificates from Dickens County, Texas for 1916 have either not survived, or haven't been digitized (the one online doesn't even have a name!  So weird.)  Everyone knows Sam's date of death from his grave marker, but I just took a little detour searching for a Dickens County death index and discovered that there was a newspaper from the town in which he died with digital scans online for that very year!  I looked it up and found the next edition after his supposed death date, scanned through the paper and found his obituary.  It confirmed his date of death, but we don't have a death certificate so we don't know what his family thought his father's name was.

The next child was named Rosemary, but she died as an infant.  There is apparently some doubt over whether she was the child that died along with Erasmus' first wife during or shortly after the birth, or whether she was the first child of Erasmus and his second wife, Rhoda.  Most trees give her a birth year of 1858 regardless of which mother they assign her to, but I think Erasmus and Rhoda married too late in the year to have had a child before 1859.

The child after that was a daughter named Mary.  She died in 1884, when she was about 24 years old.  There is a grave marker for her in May Cemetery, the same place her father and mother were buried, but it was erected much later.  How do I know this?  Well, right next to her name is the name of her brother Erasmus, known to most of us as Uncle Ras, who was actually buried in Arizona.  His inscription does not have a date death, meaning that the people who paid to have it erected did not know when he died, so it is more of a memorial than an actual grave marker.

Anyway, official death records were not kept in Brown County until 1903, so we will have to move on to the death certificate of the next child.

That would be Jacob Richard, a.k.a. "Dick."   

Death Certificate of Jacob Richard "Dick" Owen

This document has Dick's father, Erasmus Miller Owen, named as "E. M. Owen."  The informant was Dick's son, also E. M. Owen, but his initials stood for "Erasmus Marion."  I found it interesting that he knew his grandfather's name, but not his grandmother's.  I looked into my Ancestry hints for him and his siblings, and it seems that it is unclear where Jacob Richard's first three children had been born - it was either Texas, or Oklahoma.  There is a possibility that the family had moved to Oklahoma during the 1880s, before returning to Texas before the 1900 census.  That could be the reason that Dick's son didn't know his grandmother's name - she died in 1896.  Maybe he only knew his grandfather's name because he was named after him, although the fact that he knew that Erasmus Miller Owen was born in Tennessee implies that he might have either had some contact with him during the seventeen years before his death, or that his father had mentioned it enough times for the information to be remembered.  Anyway, that one is a no for the name Joseph.

Erasmus "Uncle Ras" was the next child in line.  

Death Certificate of Erasmus Owen

As I mentioned before, Erasmus was living in Arizona at the time of his death.  Because he never married and had no children, his sister Clara Owen Maben was the informant on his death certificate.  She reported that their father was E. M. Owen, born in Tennessee, and that their mother was Rhoda Eastman, born in Mississippi.  Well, she sounds like she knows what she's talking about, right?  That is the information that was in my grandmother's Family History, as well as just about every single tree you can find out there.  And this is the only death certificate of Erasmus Miller Owen's children in which the information was actually provided by . . . . one of his children!  My instinct is to give it more credence, then.  But let's look at the rest of them anyway.

(Is anyone else out there getting tired of hearing me constantly refer to Erasmus Miller Owen by his full name?  Well, now you know why I am doing that.  It is to avoid any confusion with his son, Erasmus.  If he had a normal middle name, like say . . . Joseph, I could just say Erasmus Joseph to mark the distinction.  But Erasmus Miller feels weird, because Miller sounds suspiciously like a family name, and I don't want it to sound like I am calling him Erasmus Miller [period].  Does that make sense?  But I don't want to start calling him [just] Erasmus either, because in some of my subsequent posts I will be talking about him and his son Erasmus together and I will have to refer to Erasmus as Erasmus and not Uncle Ras - it will make sense when we get there - and that will become quite the mess.  So, I apologize for being annoying.  Maybe in the next post I won't have to say his name so much!  Oh, and also, you will find that many people spell Erasmus the younger's nickname as "Raz", but I have spelled it "Ras."  My sister and I debated which spelling should be used, and then we found a letter written to Clara from her brother Conrad, and he spelled it "Ras", so that would be the correct spelling even though it sounds like it should be spelled with a "z.")

After Erasmus comes Letitia:

Death Certificate of Letitia Owen Mallory

As we will see later, Letitia and her family moved around quite a bit.  She died in the state of Washington, and one of her sons was the informant on her death certificate.  According to him, Letitia's father was named E. M. Owen, born in Tennessee, and her mother was Rhoda Eastman, born somewhere in the U.S.  Although the family moved around, they did spend some years living near her father, so her children might have gotten the knowledge of his name from him or from their mother.  So at this point, the tally for Joseph vs. not Joseph stands at one to three in favor of not Joseph.

Edgar was the child born after Letitia, and he also happened to be the informant for his father's death certificate.  Oh, what?  Have I not even shown you Erasmus Miller Owen's own death certificate?  (Ha! That's how these things go!  I guess I'll get to that one last!)  

Death Certificate of Edgar Owen

The information on Edgar's death certificate was reported by his second wife, whom he married when he was something like 50 years old.  She told the mortuary that Edgar's father was E. M. Owen, and that his mother was Salome Eastman, which were Rhoda's middle and last names - once again, information that matches what every single person out there has on their tree.  Obviously, this wife never met either of her husband's parents, which means all she had to go on was what she heard from Edgar or other family members. 

Minnie was the next child of Erasmus Miller Owen: 

Death Certificate of Minnie Owen Conklin 

Minnie and her family spent many years living near to or in the same household as her father.  Her death certificate information was filled out by her son, Russell.  Russell was only ten years old when his grandfather died, so he probably didn't have much in the way of first-hand recollections about him, so whatever he reported probably came from what he heard from his mother, aunts and uncles, or siblings.  He reported that his mother's father was named E. M. Owen, and that he was born in Tennessee.  I have no idea what the whole "Miss Areman" thing for his grandmother was.  Apparently he knew pretty much nothing about her, because he also guessed that she was born in Texas.  So, once again, we have a death certificate filled out by somebody who had either never heard or didn't believe that Erasmus Miller Owen was actually named Joseph.

After Minnie came Clara, who was my great-great-grandmother:

Death Certificate of Clara Owen Maben

Clara was born a whole twenty years after Ellen, and ten years prior to the youngest child in the family.  She was relatively old by the time she married: she had already had her twenty-eighth birthday!  Maybe, being at home for so long, she had the opportunity to hear her father's stories more than some of her siblings, like Orlena, for example, who married when she was just eighteen.  This idea comes to my mind because of the information reported on her death certificate.  The informant for Clara's death certificate was her husband, Jack, and he believed that her father's name was . . . . Joseph Erasmus Owen.  Interesting.  And do you know what else is interesting?  Clara's death certificate says that she had been living in Arizona for 40 years when she died in 1958.  That means she left Texas in about 1918.  Before she left Texas, she had been living in Fisher County.  I'll give you three guesses as to where her father died.  Yep.  According to his death certificate (I know we haven't looked at that yet!), even though he was buried in May Cemetery in Brown County, Texas (the place where his wife Rhoda was laid to rest), he actually died in Fisher County.  Perhaps he had been living with Clara and Jack in his last years.  Or maybe he had just been visiting.  Whatever it was, it is clear that Clara's husband had contact with Erasmus Miller Owen himself, and didn't just hear his wife tell about him.  I also find this interesting because he named his father-in-law as "Joseph Erasmus" and not "Erasmus Joseph" and also, the name "Miller" is nowhere to be found.  Hmmmm.  Let's see what the rest of his children's families' thought they knew.

The next child was Mark.  Unfortunately, he died in New Mexico.  This is unfortunate because apparently they are really picky over there about people's privacy and what documents they want to allow to be put up for everyone to see.  That means there is no death certificate for Mark online.  Since he died more than 50 years ago (barely - he lived to be 92!), the document is considered public records, but I would have to request a copy from the New Mexico Department of Health ($5 by mail or in person) or through some service called VitalCheck (online, but $21!).  Sooooo . . . . we are going to look at the next best thing, which is his Social Security application.  When he applied for a Social Security number in 1963 - four years before his death - he stated that his parents were E. M. Owen and Roda Eastman.  So that's another no for Joseph.

After Mark was Conrad:

Death Certificate of Conrad Owen

Conrad died just five weeks after Mark, when he was 90 years old.  His death certificate informant was his wife, who at the time was herself about 91 years old!  Since she was the one making the funeral arrangements, I assume she was still - how do I say it - in her right mind?  She would go on to live another eight years after Conrad's death.  She and Conrad were married way back in 1904, so it is more than likely that she had some contact with Erasmus Miller Owen.  What is interesting to me (I know, I find so much of this interesting!) is that she gave his name as just "Erasmus" on this death certificate, even though Conrad's brother Erasmus lived in her household for many years and, as we have begun to and will continue to see, Erasmus the elder pretty much always used his middle initial, whereas Erasmus the younger did not (I don't think he even had one, actually).  But, she had his birth location correct, and the correct information for his wife, and she doesn't name him as Joseph, so that's another check in the "no" column.

Just two children left!  The one born after Conrad was Leona:

Death Certificate of Leona Owen Partain

Leona died just a week and a day after Conrad, at the age of 88.  She was living in a rest home at the time, and although her husband was still alive, she had married him late in life and he apparently was not living in the same town as her when she died, because her nephew, a son of  Minnie, was the informant.  Erasmus Miller was living in Minnie's household in 1910, but this son, Cecil, was only two years old at the time, so how well he actually remembered his grandfather or his stories by 1967 is probably questionable.  He was in his thirties when his mother died, and in his sixties when his Aunt Leona died, so there would have been plenty of time and opportunity for him to hear recollections of his grandfather later during his life.  Cecil named him as "E. M. Owen" and he named his grandmother as Rosa Eastman, which isn't quite right but pretty close.  So, once again, we see a grandchild of Erasmus Miller Owen not remembering his name as Joseph. 

And finally, Orlena:

Death Certificate of Orlena Owen Harris

Orlena was born in 1881, just one year before we begin to find the family in Brown County instead of San Saba.  I feel like this is important, because this time sort of opened a new chapter in their lives.  (Of course, we will talk about that later, too.)  I say this because Orlena would not have actually remembered anything from the whole "Dr. Joe" time period, so if she passed on the information to her children that his name was Joseph, that would most likely have come from her parents or her siblings.  Now, you might have already looked over there to see what her death certificate says, but I haven't seen it yet - the fantastic formatting of the Blogger template squishes the image and letters together if I put up the picture before I type the words that I want to go next to it!  So, let's have a look.  Ah.  Once again, we see "E. M. Owen" and "Rhoda S. Eastman."  The information was provided by the husband of one of Orlena's daughters, so my guess is that the family either talked about Erasmus Miller and his wife a lot, or this charming son-in-law really paid attention when they did.  (Okay, I have a confession to make - I just went out and quizzed my husband to see if he knew what my grandmother's birth name was . . . . he got a B+!)

Whew!  That took forever to pull up all of those death certificates and do the research I needed for this little discussion.  And where does it leave us?  With only two out of ten of the children's death certificates referring to their father as Joseph.  Oh!  I almost forgot!  Here is the death certificate of Erasmus Miller Owen himself:

Death Certificate of Erasmus Miller Owen

Okaaaay.  Edgar Owen was the informant for his father's death certificate.  He reported the name as E. M. Owen, not Joseph.  Remember, it was Edgar's son who wrote to his sister saying that Grandpa Owen had been called Dr. Joe, and yet Edgar did not report that as his name.  I find it interesting (yes, I know) that he didn't bother to put his full name, but as I have already discovered and we will all soon see, Erasmus Miller Owen was publicly referred to by only his initials for most of his adult life.  That is how pretty much all of the Baptist records have him, and how he signed marriage certificates for marriages he performed.  So maybe Edgar, who was also a Baptist minister, just thought that would be appropriate for his death certificate as well.  I also find it interesting that Edgar supposedly didn't know his father's birth date, but I am sort of guessing that maybe the undertaker just forgot to ask.

And one more thing - I've been seeing the names of Erasmus Miller's parents floating around out there for years now, but I've never seen a document to actually confirm the information.  Well, I guess this is it.  I haven't found any other public member trees on Ancestry that have this death certificate attached.  I went looking myself after I started writing this post and couldn't find it.  It turns out that it is indexed as "E.M. Pevens."  So a search for E. M. Owen is never going to find it.  Not only that, but because he was buried in Brown County, everyone assumes that is where he died.  When I first started looking through the microfilm with all of the Texas death certificates, I too was looking in the wrong county.  I don't even remember how I figured this out (and it was only yesterday!), but I think I might have stumbled upon somebody else's tree while looking for information on one of the children or grandchildren and that is how I knew that he died in Fisher County, which I already knew was where Clara lived before she moved to Arizona.  

So anyway, now I know that whoever first started saying that his parents were Bluett Hardy Owen and Clarissa West actually had some documentation to back that up.  My grandmother's Family History didn't even get this quite right - she had the correct mother, but she had his father named Ephraim.  (I tried looking for an Ephraim Owen last year for my nieces' homeschool ancestor migration project - you can see a picture of the cool map here - and came up with absolutely no mention of such a person anywhere, so I already knew that it was probably not the name of his father.)  This document must also be how we know that Erasmus Miller Owen was born in Shelby County, Tennessee.  Sure, that is where we find his siblings on the 1850 census, but I haven't seen anything so far that says that he was actually born there.  

So.  Back to the question of the day:  What was his real name?  Well, most of the information on these death certificates was provided by grandchildren of Erasmus Miller Owen, and only one of those, the son of his eldest daughter, the only daughter who would have grown to adulthood during the "Dr. Joe" years, reported that his name was actually Joseph.  Then there were two (well, three if we want to count Mark's social security application) filled out by his actual children.  All three of those stated that his name was "E. M. Owen" without even spelling out the first or middle name.  The remaining three were filled out by the spouse of a child.  Of those, one said "E. M." Owen, one said "Erasmus" Owen, and one said "Joseph Erasmus" Owen.

Hmmmm.  Are we seeing a man who, having switched from being a Methodist preacher to an ordained Baptist minister and who, giving up the practice of doctoring at the same time, decided to drop off the name he had formerly been known by as a means of marking the transition into his new life?  I mean, back in the day when there were no birth certificates or identification cards, I suppose a person could change their name on a whim.  Just take, for example, my Grandpa Goldie, who left home and assumed a different first and last name for some unknown reason.  Or how about the time that Clara Owen Maben went to register her daughter for school and decided that she would rather have named her Clarice, and so that is what her name was ever after.  (That's what I've been told, anyway!)

I have some reservations about this idea.  For one thing, all of his brothers and sisters had names that began with the letter "E."  Unless those were actually their middle names and every single one of them discarded the use of their first name - a scenario that sounds possible but not entirely plausible - it doesn't make sense for him to have a name that began with a different letter, especially considering that on most documents he is recorded with the initials "E. M."  In addition, one of the things I discovered while working on this blog is that middle names were almost never given until the later 1700s, and were not adopted as common practice until around the 1820s.  With a birth year of 1832, our Erasmus fell solidly into the middle names for children era, but what are the chances that he had four names altogether?  Plus, since Edgar's son was aware of the "Dr. Joe" stories, that means that Edgar must have been too, and yet he did not put that name on his father's death certificate.

So, maybe instead we are seeing someone who was never actually named Joseph in the first place, but who was given "Joe" as a nickname for some reason.  (You know, like my Grandpa Maben's brothers:  Lorenzo was called Dick, Robert Graham Jr. was called Tobe, and George Gordon was called Billy.)  Maybe he wanted the people he was caring for to feel comfortable with him, so he didn't want to be formal, or, maybe, having not quite completed medical school (if we believe those stories out there), he felt it would be inappropriate to be called Dr. Owen, and saying Dr. Joe just rolled off the tongue a lot easier than Dr. Erasmus would have.  

Maybe, when Ellen and Sam were children, people called their father "Dr. Joe" and so they thought that was actually his real name (it just occurred to me that Sam's oldest child was named Josephine!  Coincidence?  Maybe not.)  And maybe, when Erasmus Miller Owen was in his later years (he lived to be 85), he would reminisce about those olden days, and maybe, just maybe, by that time he actually believed that Joe had been his real name, and he would sit around and tell these things to Clara's husband, and that is why he reported that name on his wife's death certificate.

I've thought about this a lot, and I am really, really leaning toward the nickname idea.  But you know what?  Maybe if we could solve the whole medical school mystery, we'd have a better idea about the name problem.  So that's what we are going to look at next week. See you then!

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese