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.