Deadly Sins

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 14

I know what you're all thinking - since Erasmus Miller Owen was a preacher, we are going to be talking about sin in a biblical sense.  You're probably wondering, did she uncover a skeleton in the family closet?  No, I did not.  Today we are going to talk about research sins.  As frustrating as it is to search and search for information about an ancestor and come up empty-handed, it is just as frustrating to come across a bit of information and not be able to confirm whether or not it is true.  

For example, you might remember when I was talking about the Blackshear ancestors and I found a FindaGrave entry that said something like, according to tradition, Alexander Blackshear was accompanied on his move to North Carolina by his wife's mother and one other person whose identity is unknown.  Really?  What does 'tradition' even mean?  Family stories?  The woman who wrote the entry was a professional genealogist, so I assume that such a story was floating around in manuscripts or published works somewhere.  But who knows? 

Then, of course, there is the story about Erasmus being a doctor called Joe.  At least that one is touted as a family story, so we know that there might not be any documented evidence to back it up.  But wouldn't it be great if there was?  There is also the story of Erasmus preaching in Washington state; evidence was provided, albeit without any provenance, and with careful searching we were able to discover that a mistaken assumption had been made.

When I was getting my Anthropology degree, the most important thing they hammered into us in our archaeology classes was that without provenance, an artifact is pretty much worthless.  You can't just have the head of a statue floating around out there and nobody knows where it was found.  It can't really tell us anything about a particular culture, and that is the whole point of recovering artifacts.  Likewise, when other scientists conduct experiments and medical researchers do studies, they take meticulous notes and publish their research so others can examine their methodology and test their results by conducting the experiment again.  For an archaeologist, aside from falsifying data, not publishing your research - field notes, data sets, and analysis - is probably the deadliest sin you can commit.

I first started doing genealogical research about thirteen years ago.  Back then, I was mostly just collecting any reference to an ancestor I could find.  Even though I sorted through those references and tossed out anything that seemed to belong to a different person who happened to have the same name, I wasn't really a researcher at all.  I was pretty much just collecting artifacts.  Then, when I decided to compile those 'artifacts' and try to write an ancestor's story, I needed to be as sure as I possibly could that I had things right.  That's when I realized just how important documenting sources was.  And that's why I created my own timeline and family data sheet templates to show source information for each and every detail on those charts, and comments for the entries that still seemed a bit iffy.  

Of course, listing all of the sources isn't just for the benefit of others; there has been a surprising number of times that I myself have looked back at one of my timelines or data sheets and said, what was I thinking?!  Luckily, one look at the source citation and/or comment at the bottom of the sheet and it would make sense.  Now, I've still got a lot of work to do before I come even close to being a research saint.  Although I religiously take notes when I look things up on the FamilySearch website, that is just because I can never find things on there a second time unless I record exactly where to look for it.  General internet sources however . . . I only make a record when I find something useful, and then only when I am working with a large amount of data like the Baptist yearbooks.  I don't write down every date and every website I visited in my searching like I should.  I will literally visit scores of websites in an hour of research sometimes, and there is no way I can copy all of the urls into a handwritten journal (even the website names would be tedious!).  I do create a document on my computer for each family group with all of the urls where I've found something - kind of like a bookmarks list - but with comments reminding me exactly what I found there.  My Owen document has stretched to thirty-three pages already and even though I can do a keyword search to find something specific that I'm looking for, the thought of going back and trying to sort through everything I've found and haven't talked about in this blog yet is already giving me a headache!  (I think what I really need is a filing cabinet with like hundreds of alphabetized and cross-referenced folders in it.  I think some of you understand.)

Anyway, we've conducted a lot of research into the life of Erasmus Miller Owen over the past few weeks, so today we are going to look back at the timeline I started for him and see what we need to add or change to get it up to speed with all of the data we have collected so far.

Here is what we had the last time we looked at it:

As you can see, there are a lot of changes that need to be made to the last several decades of his life.  Here is a snip of that portion, with the necessary updates:

The bold left-justified dates indicate that a major move had taken place.  The right-justified dates refer to smaller changes within the larger time-frame.  Those changes could be in his residence, his occupation, or in other details that we might want to include about his life.  Considering that, I think I want to add some things:  

That's a lot more information.  I added what the Baptist Standard yearbooks had to say about which towns he was living in during his first period of residence in Brown County, Texas.  Since he had moved to Crosby County by 1901, but was missing from the 1900 census, I had no choice but to leave that year as an unknown.  (As for the second period of time in Brown County, way down at the bottom, I don't know what I did to mess up the date formatting!)

For the years in Oregon, I also added in each specific town.  You can't see the list of sources on this image, but I used the newspaper articles and Baptist yearbooks as references for those entries.  You'll notice that there is overlap on the years in that portion of the chart - that's because the yearbooks were published with information sent in at the end of the previous year, so we know that they were in those locations for at least part of the preceding year.  The weird little two-month entry for 1907 was the time period when E. M. Owen was filling in for Conrad as pastor of the Baptist church in Astoria.  Since that town is a considerable distance from Wallowa County (412 miles!), I think it is safe to say that he was living with Conrad's family during those two months.  And, since two months is more than just a vacation, I decided to put that as its own residence on the timeline.  I think that will also be helpful to anyone who comes across a random newspaper article showing E. M. Owen in Astoria, because it explains that it was a temporary arrangement.  I just noticed, though, that the Astoria entry is under the entry for Wallowa County, so that will have to be fixed.

You'll also notice that I had to put a circa on the move to Oregon.  We know that he was there at least by late 1906, because he was reported in the 1907 yearbook.  However, it seems unlikely that he went together with either of his daughters' families, because they were both either gone or preparing to move by the end of 1904.  Here are some additional newspaper articles that I found last week that will hopefully help us narrow the date of his move down a bit:

The Goldthwaite Eagle
24 December 1904

Wait.  What?  This article is dated the end of December 1904, and it says that Erasmus Miller Owen was "late" of Emma.  So we can read that as "recently of Emma."  I interpret this as saying that he was no longer the pastor there.  However, the church he had been pastoring had it in their records that he was their pastor until 1905.  This article does not say that he was already living with his son Conrad, though.  It just says that he "has decided to make his home for a time with his son."  Perhaps Erasmus had put in his resignation with the church at Emma, but agreed to still preach there temporarily while they looked for a new pastor.  

The Goldthwaite Eagle
24 December 1904

This article was in the same edition of the newspaper, and tells about a missionary rally that both Erasmus Miller Owen and his son Edgar were a part of.  Another article in the same paper stated that Edgar was the pastor of the Baptist church at Big Valley, a town seven miles to the southwest of Goldthwaite.  And in case anyone forgot, Conrad was the pastor of the church in Goldthwaite, which is where this newspaper was published, so hopefully if anyone was confused this all makes sense now.

The Goldthwaite Eagle
7 January 1905

I love this one!  The headline of the article and introductory paragraph are all smudged, but I'm pretty sure it was either talking about a missionary meeting or the "Fifth Sunday" meeting of the Mills County Baptist Association.  From what I've read during my research, it appears that each Baptist Association held meetings every fifth Sunday, which is when they conducted business.  This sounds more like an extension of the missionary rally that was being held the week before.  The reason I like this article so much is that Erasmus and all three of his sons - Uncle Ras, Edgar, and Conrad - were all preaching sermons and leading discussions on their topics.

Three months would pass before Erasmus was mentioned in the Goldthwaite newspaper again, so maybe I was right about him still preaching at the church in Emma for a time.  Maybe he came out for Christmas and the missionary rally, and then went back to Emma for awhile before making the move permanent.  Or maybe he had moved to Goldthwaite, but traveled back to Emma twice a month or something to preach.

The Goldthwaite Eagle
1 April 1905

The first time I scanned this article, I thought it was just talking about Conrad Owen.  Thank goodness I saved a copy for later, because I just noticed while writing this that it had E. M. Owen on the schedule for 4:00 on Saturday, giving a talk about "the Sunday school as a missionary force."  Remember how I said in my last post that I was getting the feeling that Erasmus Miller Owen felt a calling to go out and reach people for Christ?  Well, so far these articles show that evangelistic and missionary work were definitely important to him.

And now that I read the first paragraph of this, I see that it is the program for the Fifth Sunday Meeting.  Looking back at the previous article, I think the first paragraph was saying that it was showing the program for the Fifth Sunday Meeting that was coming up at the end of January.  I don't know what that does about the idea of Erasmus still pastoring the Emma church in 1905!

The Goldthwaite Eagle
1 April 1905

This article is about Edgar Owen, but I included it so you could see why missions was such a big deal in west central Texas at the time.

The Goldthwaite Eagle
15 April 1905

Annnnnd another mission rally.

The Goldthwaite Eagle
22 April 1905

Once again, Erasmus and two of his sons were involved in a mission rally.  I don't know what happened to Uncle Ras, since he wasn't mentioned in this one or the last.

The Goldthwaite Eagle
13 May 1905

So this one says that E. M. Owen from Goldthwaite was in attendance.  So we can see that by May, he was indeed living with his son Conrad.  By May 6th, Conrad had resigned as pastor of the Goldthwaite church and was serving a three month term as county missionary.  

And that is the last reference I found to Erasmus Miller Owen during this time period.  A word of warning, though: when searching through old newspapers, don't assume that the search results are going to be accurate.  I did a search for "E. M. Owen" on the Texas Tech University digital newspaper collection and didn't get a result for the first December 24th article (one of the most important ones!) or for the April 15th article.  I found those later when I entered the search terms "Owen" and "mission."  And then, at 11:00 p.m. last night I found this when I was going back and opening every edition of the newspaper and doing a search for "Owen" inside the pdf itself:

The Goldthwaite Eagle
7 May 1904

This article was from almost eight months before the first one I put up there for you.  It is just another bit of evidence that shows that Erasmus was in Crosby County in 1904.  As for the brother, "E." Owen, that almost always refers to Uncle Ras, although I did come across an article last night from this newspaper in which Edgar was named as just "E."  I figured out it was him because it said he had moved to Big Valley, and in a different article it said something about his wife, and then later an article said he was the pastor of Big Valley.  So unless uncle Ras moved to Big Valley at the same time, it is slightly possible that Edgar is sometimes accidentally referred to by the paper with just his initial.

I tried to find any newspapers from Lohn, or from McCulloch County, or from any neighboring place that had copies from the early 1900s that were digitized and online, and of course I couldn't find any.  I looked up a timeline of Edgar's career that I found on Ancestry, and it skipped from 1903 to 1906, when it named him as pastor of the church in Goldthwaite and living in Big Valley.  The timeline states that the sources for the entries came from Baptist records, but we know that those are incomplete because there are numerous newspaper articles like the one up above that say that Edgar was the pastor of the church in Big Valley in 1905.  (That's why I like to cover my bases.  I spent two hours just looking for newspapers last night!)

So anyway, this is actually what the search result for this May 7th article looked like:

See?  Absolutely no mention of E. M. or E. Owen at all.  Good thing I went back and double checked.  Of course, a lot of times the OCR search function malfunctions - either because the print is faint or blurry or for some other unknown reason - and it still doesn't find every instance of a name when you search the pdf.  So, our best bet for finding all of the references to our ancestors and their family is to pick a paper in the right time and place, and just start reading.  That would take a really, really long time, but as I've said before, it really gives you a sense into what life was like for them.

As I mentioned a little bit ago, the last newspaper article I could find to mention Erasmus Miller Owen prior to his move to Oregon was from May 13, 1905.  But check this out:  

The Goldthwaite Eagle
12 August 1905

I was actually pretty excited when I found this.  Llano is a town 54 miles due south of Goldthwaite.  I thought, well, if I can find a newspaper from Llano, maybe I can find out if Erasmus went along with his son, or if he left for Oregon during that time period!  Wouldn't you know, I couldn't find a single newspaper from anywhere near there that is online.  

So.  Where does that leave us as far as our timeline is concerned?  Well, we know that Orlena and her family were preparing for their move by November of 1904.  Maybe they were delayed and didn't actually go until the summer of 1905.  Or maybe Erasmus stayed with Conrad for several more months to a whole year before leaving . . . because even though we don't see him, we do find Uncle Ras:

The Goldthwaite Eagle
5 May 1906

This report by Edgar Owen says that his brother Erasmus took part in the fifth Sunday meeting at Big Valley by preaching a sermon.  If Uncle Ras and his father went to Oregon together, this article would indicate that Erasmus Miller Owen was still living with Conrad up until this time.  However, I have found a few mentions of Conrad in the major newspapers during the second half of 1905 through 1906, as well as a few more references to him in the Goldthwaite paper, and no mention at all of his father.  I'm thinking maybe Erasmus moved to Oregon before Uncle Ras, but we just don't have enough evidence at this point to say.

I'm still going through the Goldthwaite newspaper - doing an "owen" search on the pdf of every single edition - and it is taking FOREVER.  So, I am going to leave the resolution of this portion of the timeline hanging, and next time we'll find out if I managed to find any other sources that can help us out.

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese

Oh!  One more thing!  I managed to get all of the Oregon newspaper articles from 1907-1909 combined into one pdf.  The document does not include all of the articles for Conrad or the later ones for Uncle Ras (those will have to be put into their own pdfs).  You can download the document here.  I've also gone back and added the link to my "Still Untangling" post for new readers, and for those of you who are on Ancestry, you can go to my gallery for Erasmus Miller Owen here and link it directly to your own tree.

Why Wallowa?

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 13

Today we are going to backtrack a bit and wrap up the Oregon chapter in Erasmus Miller Owen's life.  For about three years, he lived and preached in the remote Blue Mountain region of Wallowa County.  But when I sat down to add that information to his timeline, I had three questions: when exactly did he arrive, when exactly did he leave, and what prompted him to go there in the first place?  

When I first heard the story that he was up in Washington, I had a hard time believing it.  I mean, he was an old man . . . . and he'd spent his whole adult life in Texas . . . . and Washington was so far away . . . . why would he do that?  Then, when I found Conrad's letter in the Goldthwaite Eagle, which said that he found his father and two sisters in Oregon, I was actually surprised that he was up in the northwest region after all.  Knowing that two of Erasmus' daughters had gone there too, I assumed that he had been living with one of them, and so when they decided to move he just up and went with them.  That actually seems kind of silly now that I think about it, because he still had ten other children in Texas that he could have moved in with if he had preferred to stay.  Well, we now know that he most likely was NOT living with one of those two daughter before they all left, or at least he did not need to be living with one of his children, because he had been pastoring a church in the town of Emma up until 1905.  

So why did he go?  

Well, family lore states that Erasmus Miller Owen had been a Methodist circuit riding preacher on the Texas frontier for many years before becoming a Baptist.  After his conversion, ordination as a Baptist minister, and move to Brown County, he became active with the Pecan Valley Baptist Association, which was founding new churches left and right.  The association also founded Howard Payne College, with a primary focus of training new ministers.  Later, during the five years prior to his move to Oregon, he pastored a church in the town of Emma, which had only been in existence for ten years.  Emma sat in Crosby County; I did a quick gathering of statistics from the census records and found that in 1900, the county had 126 families and only one minister listed.  By 1910, the population had grown to 284 families, but there was still only one minister recorded.  (I thought there must be some mistake, but I read a history of Crosby County and it only listed two churches in the county in 1900, and only four by 1910, but two of those didn't seem to have a permanent pastor yet, so I guess the census wasn't off by much!)  Anyway, it appears that Crosby County held a steadily growing frontier population with not enough churches to serve it.  It seems to me that Erasmus Miller Owen felt a calling to spread the Gospel as far and wide as possible, and to reach those who lived in remote areas.  

But why Wallowa?  Well, Wallowa County, Oregon would have been one of those places.  The county was created out of a neighboring county in 1887.  The first white settlers had barely arrived sixteen years prior to that date.  The land is mountainous and forested, and therefore has a lot of remote areas.  The train came late, not until around 1908, and to many portions it never came at all, so much of the population remained isolated.  And as for that population, look at the census data:

In 1890, the county's population was only 3,661.  By 1900 it had jumped to 5,538, an increase of 51%.  By 1910, the population was 8,364, once again a 51% increase.  So.  The area was ✔remote . . . ✔frontier . . . ✔rapidly growing population.  Sounds like just the place Erasmus would want to be.

Of course, I don't think he was the one to up and suggest the move.  I think his passion for spreading the gospel was just the reason he decided to go along with his daughters' families.  

I wondered why his daughters decided to "homestead" there (to use the words from Conrad's letter), when there was still plenty of new land available in Texas and other southwestern territory.  Well, I'm sure his two sons-in-law were looking at the same Wallowa County characteristics when they decided to make the move.  Since the railroad had made it to that area by 1900, the railroad companies were advertising like crazy to entice new settlers into Oregon.  Most of the newcomers arrived seeking opportunities in ranching, mining, or working in the timber industry.

In my attempt to discover when and why Erasmus' daughters' families decided to make the move, I looked into the old newspapers.  Letitia's husband, B. F. Mallory, was apparently some kind of hustler (as in "an aggressively enterprising person; a go-getter"), and I'm not the only one to draw that conclusion:

The Pecos Valley Argus
6 February 1892

The Pecos Valley Argus
27 February 1892

It turns out that B. F. Mallory was something of a real-estate investor/get-rich-quick schemer (and I don't mean that in a bad way).  My research has shown me that there was an enterprising spirit among many men in Texas at the time, and those like my 2nd great-grandfather, W. C. Cheatham, and my 2nd great-granduncle, B. F. Mallory, were jumping from one money-making endeavor to another throughout the last two decades of the century.  

Mallory definitely had a head for business.  We find him and his family in New Mexico between 1889 and 1892, buying land and lots, building boarding houses and stores, and traveling back and forth to Texas to conduct business ventures there.  I found one article about a shipment of horses to Louisiana, and there are mentions of him doing business in Brown County, Taylor County, Fisher County, and Dickens County, Texas.  Then, on the 1900 census, Letitia and their kids were in Texas, but her husband was in . . . a mining camp near Waha, Idaho!  And, it just so happens that he had a claim on the Snake River, which creates the border between Idaho and Wallowa County, Oregon.  

Way back at the beginning of my Owen research, I found a member story on Ancestry that said that the way Benjamin Mallory got his cabin in Oregon was something like he came upon it when three other miners were already living there.  He moved in with them and made himself so obnoxious that they finally left and he had it to himself.  I can't find the story now (of course I can't!), but it implies that he was in Oregon prior to his family's arrival.  

But when was that, exactly?  And did Erasmus Miller Owen make the move at the same time?  I looked up the Bureau of Land Management land grant records to see what the date on their homestead records were, and I discovered that Benjamin F. Mallory didn't receive his land patent until 1913.  (I don't know how to find the applications, just the final patent document.  If anyone out there knows how to look those up, shoot me an email and let me know!)  There was no listing for Erasmus' other son-in-law, Orlena's husband Philemon Frank Harris, in the land grant records at all.  I know that Orlena was the other sister who moved to Oregon, though, because of this:

Delayed Birth Certificate of Charles Simpson Harris
Wallowa County, Oregon

This shows us that Orlena and her husband Frank were living in Oregon by September of 1905.  I'm sure they were there several months prior to that, though, because who is going to move to a new home - scratch that - a new home that is more than 1,500 miles away, when they are heavily pregnant?  

I found this newspaper article just yesterday:

The Goldthwaite Eagle
12 November 1904

See?  They were already planning their move by the end of 1904.

But what about Letitia?  The story about the cabin implies that her husband got settled in Oregon before she and the younger children moved.  I didn't find any articles about him in the Oregon newspapers until something like 1909, but I did find this mention of their oldest son:

The Morning Oregonian
12 October 1904

This article tells of the death of Benjamin and Letitia Owen Mallory's eldest son.  I believe the reference to him coming from the East is referring to the fact that he had been in Idaho with his father.  But whether B. F. Mallory moved to Grouse at the same time, or whether he came because of his son's death, I can't say.  Either way, it looks like it was sometime in 1904 when the first of Letitia's family moved to Wallowa County.  As for Letitia herself, well, she had a son born in 1902 in Texas.  And then came her daughter "Dot":

Birth Certificate of Dorothy Amanda "Dot" Mallory

She was born in April of 1905 in Wallowa County.  The document says she was born in Bartlett, but that is right there in the vicinity of Grouse.  So now we know that Letitia was also in Oregon by the beginning of 1905.  But look what I just found - literally five minutes ago:

Obituary of Louis Orlando "Buck" Mallory
The Lewiston Tribune
8 July 1966

Very interesting.  This article is about Letitia's son, Louis Orlando.  It says that his family moved to Idaho in 1903 before heading over to Wallowa County a year later.  Now, I have seen a lot of mistaken information in obituaries, but this information was probably given by his wife, who wasn't all that old and had grown up and lived in the same area as the rest of Louis' family.  So I feel pretty confident that we can say that Letitia left Texas in 1903, and was in Wallow County by 1904, perhaps arriving at the same time as her son, Perry Oscar.  (Maybe that log cabin story was referring to B. F. Mallory's arrival in Idaho, not Oregon!)

So now we know that Erasmus Miller Owen almost certainly did NOT travel to Oregon with one of his daughters, but went either on his own, or with his son Erasmus (Uncle Ras) later.  I am almost certain that he decided to make the move because his daughters expressed that there was a need for preachers in Wallowa County.  I have a tab sitting open on my computer right now with a few search results for E. M. Owen in Texas during the years prior to his move; I haven't had time to look at them yet, but they might help us answer that question.  Unfortunately, those will have to wait until next week.  For now, I'll leave you with some photos of Wallowa County.  (But first, a map!)

Map of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company
and the Southern Pacific Company. (1906)

This map was actually an advertisement; at the top it said, "THE NORTHWEST PRESENTS THE GREATEST OPPORTUNITIES FOR SETTLERS OF ANY PORTION OF 'UNCLE SAM'S' DOMAIN."  The bottom said, "FOR GRAINS, GRASSES, FRUIT, LIVESTOCK AND MINERALS THE TERRITORY EMBRACED IN THIS MAP IS UNEQUALED."

(The large river on the right is the Snake River, which forms the boundary between Idaho and Oregon.)

(I didn't put the map key up, but the portion of the railroad line that has the little lines all along the edges was the proposed future route.  The train didn't even make it as far as the town of Wallowa - sorry, no star, but it is between Enterprise and Elgin - until 1908.  Take note of the fact that, heading north, there was a road from Wallowa north toward Troy and Grouse, but it didn't go through.  It looks like one would have had to travel from Enterprise to Wallowa, curve back east and then up to Flora, and then cross the river before continuing to the area.)

Some modern photos of Enterprise:

Enterprise Oregon, looking toward the Wallowa Mountains
photo credit

Within the town of Enterprise
photo credit

And one from c. 1910, just after Erasmus Miller Owen left the area:

Early Enterprise, Oregon
photo credit

These next photos shows the area around Joseph, which was just five miles south of Enterprise.  Joseph was where Orlena and her family had settled and where Uncle Ras spent some time visiting and preaching:

Joseph, Oregon
photo credit

Wallowa Lake, south of Joseph
photo credit

Mt. Howard, just south of Joseph

And now some historical photos of the area:

Joseph, Oregon

Main Street in Joseph c. 1910

Skating on Wallowa Lake

And now, heading north from Enterprise to the Grouse Flat/Bartlett area on the Washington border:

Near Troy, Oregon heading north to Grouse Flat
photo credit

Grouse Flat, Oregon

Does anyone remember the newspaper articles saying that Erasmus Miller Owen spent the night at Sled Springs on his way back from visiting his daughter?  It turns out that Sled Springs wasn't a town - it was a stage stop with a barn and "hotel":

Sled Springs Stage Stop
(Wallowa County History Center)

Wallowa County Stage 
photo credit

This photo shows the first train and last stage between the towns of Wallowa and Elgin.  As far as I could tell from my research, the train never did reach Grouse Flat.  But yikes!  This stage looks even smaller than the other one!  And it is hard to tell, but the sides of the stage coach were just made out of canvas.  Can you imagine how cold it would have been in the winter?  Conrad made the trip in January!!  

But look at how many horses were used to make the trip from Elgin to Joseph:

Stage from Elgin to Joseph
(Wallowa County History Center)

It was only ten miles more, but it must have been a much harder ride. 

Oh, and I forgot to mention before, that I also found a story on Ancestry saying that Letitia and Ben Mallory travelled to Oregon in a covered wagon.  Since the railroad went all the way there from Texas by 1900, I find that highly doubtful, but they would have had to travel from Idaho to Wallowa County by wagon (or take a very out-of-the-way train ride and then a wagon from La Grande to Grouse Flat), so maybe that is where the story originated.

Okay, just a few more, so you can really get a sense of how our family lived way back when:

Homestead on the Snake River
photo credit

It is possible that Ben and Letitia lived someplace like this in Idaho and even in Oregon. (Conrad did write in his letter that their cabin was "backed up under a large hill" and overlooking a river!)  

Ferry on Grande Ronde River near Troy, Oregon

Conrad's letter also said that from the Mallory homestead you could see the Salmon River "over the bench."  According to Wikipedia, " a bench or benchland is a long, relatively narrow strip of relatively level or gently inclined land that is bounded by distinctly steeper slopes above and below it."  If you look on a map, you can see that the Wenaha River meets the Grande Ronde River at Troy (I forget which flows into which) which flows up past the Grouse area.  I did some digging, and it turns out that the Wenaha used to be called the Little Salmon River.  Anyway, this photo looks like it was taken c. 1900-1912, and it is possible that Erasmus and his family had to use this very same ferry when they went back and forth between Grouse and Enterprise.

This next photo shows some men hauling a load of logs:

Hauling a Load of Logs near Summerville
photo credit

It's easy to see how one of those could kill a man, huh?  Notice how these ones are being hauled on sleds, not wheeled wagons.  I read somewhere that sleds were used by farmers to take goods to market up until the 1920s.  (Although what goods anyone is taking to market during winter I don't know!)

Switching gears a bit, here is the town of Astoria, where Conrad was living while the rest of his family was in Wallowa County, and where Erasmus Miller Owen filled in as pastor for him while he was off doing the revival stuff in 1907:

Astoria, Oregon - c. 1908
photo credit

Well if that wasn't a change of pace!  Goodbye stagecoach, hello trolley! 

And here is St. Johns, Oregon, where Conrad and his father and brother had moved by the end of 1909: 

St. Johns, Oregon - c. 1908

And that's it for this week.  I hope you enjoyed the little glimpse into that period of our family's lives.

                                                                                                                                                - Therese

Fortunately, Unfortunately

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 12

When I was a kid, my sisters and I used to play a game called "Fortunately, Unfortunately."  Does anyone out there know what I mean?  You just sit around and take turns making up a story together that goes something like this:

One day I was flying in an airplane over a remote area in Montana.  Unfortunately, the plane's engine stopped mid-flight.  Fortunately, I had a parachute, and was able to jump out of the plane before it crashed.  Unfortunately, my parachute got caught in a tree, and I was left dangling thirty feet off the ground.  Fortunately, the parachute ripped and came free of the tree.  Unfortunately, I fell thirty feet.  Fortunately, I hit enough springy branches on my way down, that I landed without breaking any bones.  Unfortunately, I was lost in the middle of nowhere with no supplies. 

Sometimes, that's how research goes, folks.

Remember back several weeks ago, when I was talking about going down the rabbit hole, I showed you that search result I got on the FamilySearch book page that showed E. M. Owen preaching a sermon on the first day of some kind of get-together, but I couldn't view it online because it was protected?  My first instinct was to say Murphy's Law is alive and well!  But, looking on the bright side, at least the search result let me know that I should start looking for Erasmus Miller Owen in places other than San Saba or Brown County.  I have since done a lot, and I mean a lot of searching for another copy of that journal, mostly with no success.  I pretty much get no hits from my Google searches.  I took another look at the catalog entries on FamilySearch and discovered that all of the editions of that genealogical journal are housed at the Pocatello Idaho FamilySearch Library.  And I said to myself, Drat.  That's in Idaho, an hour's drive from Idaho Falls.  Oh!  My sister lived near Idaho Falls for a few years!  Alas, she no longer lives there.  Drat again.  Oh!  But she was just up there visiting a couple of months ago . . . After I knew I needed this, but before I knew where it was.  Drat and double drat!  

So there I was last week, doing another search for Plainview, Texas, the town mentioned in the journal title, and I must have put in some new search term with the town name, because I came across this:  

This is a page from a blog by Phyllis Wall, the president of the Hale County Historical Commission. This isn't the edition I need, but I did discover that a couple of years ago they were trying to locate and acquire as many copies of the journal as they could.  I'm going to try and contact them and see if they have the one I need and would be willing to scan the pages for me.  (I'll let you know how it goes.)

On the same day, I was on the Baylor University Digital Collections website, looking to see if there was any mention of Erasmus Miller Owen in Oregon.  I got nine hits for my search (none of which were about Oregon), seven from 1898-1902, one from 1914, and one from 1990.  I looked at the first eight and found them helpful.  I wasn't even going to look at the last one, because surely a 1990 reference must be about an entirely different person, but I told myself I had better take a look anyway.  Just in case.

Always look!

This is what I saw:

O.M.G.  Did any of you get as excited as I did when you read that just now?  Now, I already knew that Erasmus Miller Owen had been in the town of Emma, because I had come across that information in a couple places, even though I haven't had a chance to share it all with you yet.  This was cool for three reasons; first, it told me that E. M. Owen was the pastor of the church there, second, it told me during which years, and third, it told me that Ima Jean Powell was doing research on our guy.  Now, you might be saying so what if Ima Jean Powell was doing research on our guy?  Well, this was 1990.  The church in Emma was founded in something like 1891.  That means that Mrs. Powell was probably putting together a 100-year-history-of-the-church-thing.  But then I thought to myself, this query was published thirty years ago!  

I wondered if Mrs. Powell ever found a photo of Erasmus.  I wondered if she was still at that church.  I thought maybe, just maybe, I could contact the church and talk to Mrs. Powell and who knows what kind of information they might have that they could share with me!

I looked up both the church and Ima Jean Powell.  And this is what I found:

Obituary of Ima Jean Powell

Unfortunately, Ima Jean Powell had passed away . . . three months ago.   How's that for Murphy's Law?   This does say, however, that she wrote a church history, so maybe the church still has a copy, and maybe they have a digital copy, or maybe they can send me a paper copy . . . .  I'll let you know how that goes, too.  

In the meantime, I'm going to need something to fill out this post!  How about we take a look at all of the American Baptist Year-book editions for the Texas listings?  We might as well get that out of the way, plus I think it might be helpful for next week's post.  There are actually more than thirty editions that I've pulled information from, which is obviously way too many to put up here.  (You wouldn't believe how long it takes to look up, save, insert, caption, and link a single image for this blog.)  Luckily, I took notes in my research journal when I first looked through all of the books, so I ought to be able to get this post up on time this week if I just list them out like I did with the information in the last post.  

So, here goes:

I think every branch of the family has heard the story that Erasmus Miller Owen was a circuit-riding-Methodist-preacher-turned-Baptist-minister, but I didn't know when that conversion was supposed to have taken place.  So, I began looking as far back as I could find the books, just to make sure I didn't miss anything. 

Ordained Ministers in Texas:

1873:  no Owens

1874:  E. Owens - Bonham

1875:  E. Owens - Bonham

1876:  E. Owens - Bonham

Fortunately, I got a hit for a Baptist Minister with the right first initial and last name.  Unfortunately, there are three problems: Erasmus Miller Owen always used his middle initial; Bonham, Texas is in Fannin County, way up in northeastern Texas; and as far as we know, our E. M. Owen was living in San Saba County - way over in west central Texas - during the 1870s.  But how can we know for sure?  Fortunately, I found this on a rootsweb page:

903. Horace W.¹⁰ Hunt (68) (Richard⁹, Horace⁸, Gad⁷, Simeon⁶, Ebenezer⁵, Jonathan⁴, Thomas³, Thomas², Thomas¹) was born on 14 Dec 1849 at Bonham, Fannin County TX. He married Frances Elender Irick (87) on 15 Feb 1872 at Choctaw Nation (Married by W.J.B. Lloyd,Chocktaw Nation- joining the Missionary Baptist Church. Baptised by Elder E. Owens). He died on 23 Jun 1934 at Lamasco, Fannin County, Texas, at age 84. He was buried at Fannin County, Texas.
In July 1881 they joined the Missionary Baptist Church and were baptized in Baisdark Creek, Fannin County TX by Elder E. Owens.

Yeah.  I don't think this is our guy.  

1877-1882:  no surviving volumes

Unfortunately, none of the three libraries that have had their holdings digitized by Google (Harvard, University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library) seem to have retained a copy for those six years.

1883:  E. Owens - Honey Grove
            E. M. Owen - Clio

Honey Grove is a town in Fannin County.  So there we have the E. Owens from above.  Clio was a town in Brown County.  That is consistent with what we already know about Erasmus Miller Owen's whereabouts.  But . . . . I found E. M. Owen on another page:

American Baptist Year-book, 1883

E. M. Owen was ordained in Bend, Texas, a community on the San Saba and Lampasas County border, in 1882!  Very, very, fortunately, the digitized issues picked up again with this year!  And look what I just stumbled across two days ago:

The San Saba News
11 Feb 1882

Unfortunately, I don't even remember how I managed to find this.  But fortunately, it is on the Chronicling America website, and I kept the tab open on my computer.  Unfortunately, if you want to download the whole page, it saves it as a jpg2, which my (and maybe your) computer can't view.  Fortunately, I uploaded it to an online converter, and changed it to a regular jpg, so if anyone wants a copy of the whole page of the newspaper, it can be found and downloaded here.

Okay.  Back to the yearbooks!

1884:  E. M. Owen - Clio

1885:  E. M. Owen - Clio

1886:  E. M. Owen - Clio
            A. H. Owens - Clayton

Unfortunately, we can't be absolutely certain whether Erasmus Miller Owen was actually in Clio all this time or not.  Remember, if the church or association that served the Clio area did not send in a report, the book just published the last known information.  As for this other Owens, guy, he was way over in east Texas.  I've only been able to find references to him in Baptist publications.

1887:  E. M. Owen - May

Aha!  Fortunately, we can be absolutely certain that Erasmus Miller Owen was in the town of May near the end of 1886, because this is a change from what was published in the previous year.  

1888:  E. M. Owen - Dodd

Dodd?  That is a town I never came across in any of my research so far.  Unfortunately, the internet only wants to tell me about a Dodd in Castro County, waaaaaay up in the Texas panhandle, and a Dodd City that is in Fannin County.   Hmmmm.  That's where that E. Owens guy was.  Either there was a town of Dodd in Brown County that I can't find any information about, or this is not our guy. 

1889:  E. M. Owens - Bonham

1890:  E. M. Owens - Bonham
            A. H. Owens - Teneha

1891:  E. M. Owens - Bonham
            A. H. Owens - Teneha

Aaaaahhh.  Fortunately, we now see an E. M. Owens in Bonham, a town in Fannin County 15 miles from Honey Grove, where E. Owens had a church.  So, this is probably the same man as the one who was in Dodd.  Unfortunately, that means that our E. M. Owen is nowhere to be found.  Fortunately, we already know exactly where he was, because these are the years that he was sitting around in Brown County starting Howard Payne College.  (As for that A. H. Owens who mysteriously shows up again, Teneha is in north east Texas, and I still haven't been able to find him in any non-Baptist records.  And now that I come to think of it, I can't find this other E. M. Owens either!  Weird, right?) 

1892:  E. M. Owens - May
            A. H. Owens - Teneha

Unfortunately, I am more than a bit confused.  I am starting to wonder if the publishers were confused.  It appears that there were two E. M. Owens/Owenses (Uuuggghh.  Why can nobody get this straight?), one in Brown County and one in eastern Texas.  But where did the other guy go?  And why was our guy not listed the previous four years?  Perhaps the people putting together the book thought this was the same man so they just picked one location or the other?

1893:  E. M. Owens - May

            A. H. Owens - Clio 

Oh, brother!  Fortunately, we see Erasmus Miller Owen back where we expect him to be.  Unfortunately, we now see this other strange Owens guy in the same town where our guy had been, only nine miles south of the town of May.  But just wait for the next one . . . . 

1894:  E. M. Owens - May
            A. H. Owens - May

            Edgar Owen - Johnson City

           Ministers ordained in 1893: Edgar Owen, Willow City, TX

Okay.  Fortunately, we know that this Edgar was Erasmus Miller Owen's son, because both locations listed for him were in Gillespie County, and that is where he married his wife in 1893.  Unfortunately, we now see both our guy, E. M. Owen, and that other guy, A. H. Owens, in the exact same place.  Who was this guy?  A cousin?  A nephew?  Some random preacher with an almost the same last name?  

1895:  E. M. Owens - May
            A. H. Owens - Bynum
            Edgar Owen - Johnson City

Fortunately, E. M. Owen is still shown in May.  Unfortunately, we don't know if that is really accurate or not.  A. H. Owens was supposedly in Bynum, a town in Hill County, Texas, which is nowhere near Brown County.  Fortunately, we don't really care about him so it doesn't matter.  (In fact, I am going to stop listing him now.)  Unfortunately, this makes me wonder if the publication made a lot of mistakes while recording and typesetting lists containing thousands of names (I did the math - there were approximately 22,600 names listed!), so I don't know how trustworthy this information really is.  (And the book claims to be "if not complete," at least "accurate"!)

1896:  E. M. Owens - May
            Edgar Owen - May

            A. H. Owens - Bynum

1897:  E. M. Owens - May
            Edgar Owen - Waldrip
         

1898:  E. M. Owens - May
            Edgar Owen - Waldrip

           

1899:  E. M. Owens - May
            Edgar Owen - May

Fortunately, because new information was reported in 1897 and 1899 (meaning the end of 1896 and 1898), we can be fairly confident that these locations are accurate (barring any transcription errors or type-setting mistakes).  

1900:  E. M. Owens - May
            Edgar Owen - May

            

1901:  E. M. Owens - May
            Edgar Owen - May

          

1902:  E. M. Owens - May
            Edgar Owen - May

For four years in a row there were no changes in the records.  Unfortunately, we know that this is not all correct, because Erasmus Miller Owen was supposedly in the town of Emma by 1901, which means that should have been reported in the 1902 book.  Fortunately, I have also found some other Baptist records beginning in 1898 that will help us sort this all out. (We'll look at those later.)

            

1903:  E. M. Owens - Emma
            Edgar Owen - Stacey

            Conrad Owen - Waco

1904:  E. M. Owens - Emma
            Edgar Owen - Stacey

            Conrad - Santa Anna

1905:  E. M. Owens - Bangs
            Edgar Owen - Stacey

            Conrad - Santa Anna

            C. L. - Goldthwaite

There, finally, we see E. M. Owen in Emma!  This shows that he was there by the end of 1902 and at least until the end of 1904.  And then, in 1905, he is back in Brown County, in the town of Bangs.  So fortunately, we know that we can trust some of these entries.  Unfortunately, without corroborating evidence, in many case we don't know which ones we can trust! 

Also, look what's going on with that Conrad - I assumed that was Erasmus Miller Owen's son, but then in 1905 we see both Conrad and C. L., who was in Goldthwaite.  We know for sure from other sources that C. L. was Erasmus' son Conrad Luther, and that he was in Goldthwaite in 1905, so I don't know who the other Conrad was.  Once again, not a super common name, so maybe he was a relative.  

And just a disclaimer - for these entries from the 1900s, I am not showing all of the Owens/Owenses; there were eleven different men with the last name listed for Texas.

1906:  E. M. Owens - Bangs
            Edgar Owen - Stacey

            C. L. - Goldthwaite

1907:  E. M. Owens - Bangs

            B. M. Owens - Grouse
            Edgar Owen - Stacey

            C. L. - Goldthwaite

           

Okay.  In the 1907 book, there was no change in the Texas names from 1906, which showed no change from 1905.  Now, I spent a bit of time this past week trying to date the family's move to Oregon, and I realized that I should probably go back and check the 1907 listings for that state.  (In my last post, I began with the 1908 book.)  Low and behold, there was the entry for a "B." M. Owens in Grouse.  I think I saw that way back when and dismissed it because I didn't realize that it made sense to find him there and in that year.  Plus, of course, the typo with his name!

If you look through the next several years, you will find Edgar in Texas and New Mexico.  Erasmus Miller and Conrad are listed in both Texas and Oregon for 1908, and then they and Erasmus/Uncle Ras are listed in Oregon and Washington through 1910.  In 1911, there is no E. M. Owen listed at all.  But then . . . .

1912:  E. M. Owen - Bangs
            Edgar Owen - Snyder

            C. L. Owen - Laurel (OR)

            Erasmus - Vancouver (WA)

Fortunately, this is what we would expect to see, since we know that he had returned to Texas by the spring of 1910 and was living in Brown County.  Unfortunately, we don't see Erasmus Miller Owen again in the books, not even on the list of ordained ministers who passed away in 1917.  

So.  Fortunately, we found some useful information for tracking Erasmus Miller Owen's movements and making a timeline of his life.  Unfortunately, we also found some information that is at best confusing and at worst completely wrong.  But you know what?  That's how research goes.  We take the bad with the good and try to sort it all out, and we cross our fingers that we get as close to what really happened as possible.  So next time, we'll look at some random primary source documents and see if they can help us out with that process.

                                                                                                                                               - Therese