Untangling the Strands

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 8

I have a feeling that today's post is going to be a messy one.  I was all set and ready to write, and I knew just where I was going to begin.  It was supposed to go something like this:

Who remembers, back when we were talking about "The Legend of Dr. Joe," how I was more than a bit skeptical of a certain family story - a certain family story about my family - that wasn't a story my family had in its collection of family stories?  Especially because that particular family story was quite a ways out of the realm of my family's other family stories, and also especially because it was about the man whom I guess could be considered the patriarch of that particular branch of my family!  Well, that wasn't the only story that I found hard to swallow.

In the Owen Family Association Newsletter, Sylvia Teague made the following claim:

By December 24, 1913, when 81-year-old Erasmus filed his application for a Confederate pension, he was described as "feeble". . . . Even though he may have been "feeble," that didn't stop him from journeying to Washington state at age 84.  In 1916, the local newspaper lists Erasmus as acting Pastor of the Baptist Church at Palouse, in the southeast corner of Washington.  It is also near the area where his daughter, Letitia, and her husband, Ben Mallory, lived.

When I first came across this, I was like, um okay, but I wasn't really buying it.  I thought that there must be some mistake, that this researcher had gotten our Erasmus Owen confused with some other Erasmus Owen who just so happened to also be a Baptist preacher.  I know, what are the chances, right?  But my mother said to me, "Oh, I have that article," so I took a look, and this is what I saw:

Oooh.  Not Good.  First of all, we have absolutely no idea which newspaper this came from.  Second, we don't know the exact date of that paper.  I tried finding this article on both GenealogyBank and Newspapers.com with no success.  

I finally ended up on the LDS Genealogy page for Whitman County, Washington (I had to look up what county Palouse was located in) today - like a half an hour ago - and it said there were some newspapers online, and that led me to some obscure website called SmallTownPapers.  (I didn't decipher that print at the top of this image until after I found the website.)  The site is pretty impossible to navigate - you can't do a search of its entire collection (you have to choose a specific newspaper!) and you can't sort your results by date; however, I finally managed to find this exact article, and it came from the August 14, 1916 edition of The Palouse Republic.  (In case any of you are wondering what is up with the quality of the image or why the page is cropped so strangely, it is apparently because you get to see a pretty small image of the paper for free, but cannot zoom in or save anything without a paid subscription.  Thus, the lovely screenshot.)

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure most of us clip just the newspaper articles we are interested in, and don't save entire editions of a newspaper.  The problem with that method of record retrieval is, as we have just seen, nobody - not even yourself after five whole minutes have passed - remember the date of the paper it came from, and after a day or two it is most likely that nobody will even remember the name of the newspaper either . . . . especially if you are clipping a lot of articles from different papers.

Unfortunately, this is most unhelpful for anybody - oneself included -who wants to verify that the information in the article actually belongs to the person it has been attributed to.  Having said that, I would like to encourage everyone to save the name of the newspaper, the date of the edition, and the person being mentioned in the actual filename of every article you save.  That way you will never forget, and you will save the rest of us whole mountains of frustration.

Okay.  So I had this article.  What was I to do with it?  It was just floating around without any context, so there was no way to know if it was talking about Erasmus Miller Owen or not.  Luckily, I now have confirmation that it was indeed written in 1916 in Palouse, Washington.  That's something, but more research is needed before we can even begin to think about accepting this.

If you don't believe me, I would like to share the fact that there were no less than three different Harry Goldies (the name my great-grandfather adopted for himself) floating around the United States in the years between the time he left his home in Iowa and when he arrived in Arizona.  One was a prize-winning boxer, one was a bank robber, and one, who just so happened to also have a wife name Theresa, was the manager of a hotel or something in Illinois in the early 1920s.  Unfortunately, since we cannot confirm every place he traveled during his early adulthood, a random article that says that Harry Goldie was in jail in Nevada doesn't really tell me whether he was my Harry Goldie or not.

So, back to the day I first saw this . . . I still wasn't convinced that this was our guy.  It just didn't make sense to me that he would travel to Washington at 84 years old, pastor a church, and then go back to Texas the following year and die.  Something about that scenario just didn't sound right.  So I said to myself, what if it was actually his son Erasmus?

And that is when things rapidly fell apart from a blog-writing perspective, because now I had two life stories - along with all of the documentation that went along with them - to try to untangle.

Wouldn't it be nice if I could just say, I now know exactly who the article was referring to - just trust me, and then everyone would trust me?  Unfortunately, for myself and many of you out there, it doesn't really work that way.  Also unfortunately, it was a very, very long and very, very, very convoluted process I had to go through to prove whether or not the pastor in question was really Erasmus Miller Owen.  It involved a whole lot of random searching on Ancestry and the Portal to Texas History, the purchase of a Newspapers.com and a GenealogyBank subscription, and knowledge of the family story pertaining to Uncle Ras.

I wanted to just talk about Uncle Ras in his own blog post, because I have a ton of primary source stuff for him . . . . and it's complicated; complicated enough that it might be impossible to separate it into some bits for a blog post on his father and other bits for a blog post about himself.

So here I am, fifteen minutes of typing into this post, and I have no idea how to proceed.  I think maybe this might need to be a two-part post, but let's see how it turns out.

Okay.  So, the day before we had this conversation at my mom's house, I had been doing some searches on the Portal to Texas History.  I started with "Owen" and got waaaaaaay too many hits.  I tried "Erasmus Owen," and got one result: a genealogical magazine mentioning that marriage he performed that I showed you back in like my first post or something.  I tried "E. M. Owen," and all I got was a bunch of stuff related to the founding of Howard Payne College, and two newspaper articles that were probably referring to a much younger man.  So then, slightly depressed by the fact that I hadn't found anything, I turned to searching for his sons, since I was going to need to put dates and place names on all of their photos at some point.  I got quite a few hits for his son Conrad, because he was a Baptist pastor in Texas and the newspaper from the town where his church was located just so happened to have been preserved and was digitized and online.  

I started reading the articles in order and downloading them as well, which was pretty tedious because I had to snip the portion I wanted and then type in a really long file name that included not only the name of the person the article was about, but also the newspaper, and the date, and a note indicating what the article was talking about. (You would not believe the trouble I had finding a specific saved article out of hundreds before I started doing that.)  That is why I hadn't finished it by the time my mom showed me the article from Washington.  So, I went back home and continued with my search and discovered something amazing. 

Now, Conrad had been the pastor of a church in Goldthwaite, Texas, starting in June of 1903.  I'm not sure when he left, because the Portal to Texas History has a gap in the Goldthwaite Eagle running from 1905 to 1907.  (I just discovered today that I can browse the missing copies on the Texas Tech University website, so I'll have the answer to that question eventually.)  Anyway,  as I was going through the articles I found this:

The Goldthwaite Eagle
4 May 1907

Hmmm.  Erasmus Miller Owen's son Conrad was in Oregon in 1907.  And Conrad's sister was also in that area.  Okay.  That's near Washington.  I kept on going through the search results and then I found the thing that was so amazing.  Take a look at this:

The Goldthwaite Eagle
11 Jan 1908

Isn't that amazing?  I mean, what a glimpse into their lives! 

(This article did not originally appear like this - it was one long strip which isn't workable for saving as a jpg and sticking into a blog post, so I had to cut it up to take large enough screenshots that they wouldn't be blurry and then stick it back together into this format.  There are a few spots where it looks like I messed up and cut out some words - or even whole lines - but I assure you, either Conrad's original letter read that way or the printer made some mistakes when setting the type.  You can find a jpg of the entire page from the newspaper here.)

In his letter, Conrad says that he "found" his father exactly one year before he wrote this letter, so now we have proof that Erasmus Miller Owen was living in Oregon in January of 1907.  We don't know when he arrived, and we don't know when he returned to Texas, but that is a problem for another time.  Right now we are trying to figure out if great great (so-on) grandfather was ever a pastor in Washington.

Well, it's looking more possible, isn't it?

Now that I knew where to look, I discovered an Erasmus Owen in some Washington city directories:

R. L. Polk & Co.'s
Spokane City Directory
1915

R. L. Polk & Co.'s
Spokane City Directory
1916

Both of these directories show Conrad and Erasmus living in the same household, and they also show that they both had the title of Reverend.  Although the address listed is different for 1915 and 1916, both indicate that Conrad was the pastor of Central Baptist Church, but that Erasmus was not pastoring a church in the city of Spokane at that time.  

R. L. Polk & Co.'s
Spokane City Directory
1917

The 1917 directory shows pretty much the same thing as the 1916 edition.  Both Conrad and Erasmus were listed.  

So, what does this tell us?  Well, it tells us that the Erasmus Owen in Conrad's household was definitely either his father or brother.  Also, since Palouse is just 55 miles south of Spokane, the Erasmus who was pastoring a church there could have been the same person. 

But Erasmus Miller Owen died in Texas in May of 1917.  Could this still be Erasmus Sr.?  Well, in the 1918 directory, there is no Erasmus found in Spokane, so that fits within the timeframe we have for him.  But in what month were these actually published?  If each one came out at the beginning of year, the information must have been submitted during the the previous year, right?  According to the Library of Congress, information for city directories was collected by going door to door (who knew?!) which means they probably started collecting the data months prior to publishing a new directory.  That means that the 1917 directory actually shows us who lived in that place during - at best - the fall of 1916.

Is it possible that the elder Erasmus, though too feeble to preach in Texas anymore, not only up and moved to Washington, but also pastored a church there?  And not only that, but is it possible that the feeble elder Erasmus pastored a church 55 miles south of his actual residence?

Even after finding these directories, I was still more that a little skeptical of the whole idea - perhaps even more so than before!  I wondered how in the world the supposedly aged preacher would even get down to Palouse every Sunday anyway.  So, of course, I did some more research.

It turns out that Palouse is actually a city in the Palouse, a "distinct geographic region of the northwestern United States, encompassing parts of north central Idaho, southeastern Washington, and, by some definitions, parts of northeast Oregon" (Wikipedia).  

Spokane and Inland Empire Railroad
Electric Railway map (1906)

In 1915, there was an electric train that ran all the way from Spokane to Palouse.  This "interurban railroad" linked commuters in the urban and rural areas of the Palouse region.  According to this article, the trains were powerful enough to climb steep hills, and could travel 70 miles an hour on the flats!  That means a person could make it from Spokane to Palouse in about an hour.

I couldn't find an old timetable for the line on the internet, but I know that the train ran on Saturday mornings because there was a huge disaster in 1915 when a bridge collapsed in Spokane, taking two train cars down into the river with it.  (In addition to the passenger injuries and deaths, gas and electricity were cut off to portions of the city.  I wonder if Conrad and Erasmus were affected by the event.  You can read about it here if you are interested.)  I suppose it is possible that Erasmus would hop on the train on Sunday mornings, preach a sermon and visit the members of the congregation, and then travel back home to Spokane in the evening.  If the trains didn't run on Sunday, maybe he would do a Saturday-Monday trip and stay in the home of a family from the congregation overnight.  I'm thinking that this whole train thing sounds like what probably happened, because I can't think of any other scenario that really makes sense.  But once again . . . . I just can't see 84 year-old Erasmus Miller Owen doing this.  

But could it actually have been his son, Erasmus the younger?  For those of you who have heard the same family story about Uncle Ras as my family tells, that doesn't sound right either.  But unless it was Conrad's nephew, Dick's son Erasmus (who appears to have been a farmer who spent his whole adult life in Texas), it had to be one or the other.

Well, at this point I knew I was going to have to turn to the newspapers from Washington and Oregon.  Those finally answered the question for me.  Unfortunately, it took something like 50 articles before I was sure (I think I'm sure, anyway), so we are going to have to untangle those next time!

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese