Getting Back On Track

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 16

In an attempt to get back on schedule with these posts, I have decided that today we will tackle those Baptist records I mentioned last week.  Since I've already done the finding part of the work, now I only have to do the saving of the books (downloadable in pdf format), then the saving of the individual pages (not available for download in any format so must be printed from the booklet pdf to a single page pdf), then the conversion of each page into a jpg, and then the uploading of the images into this blog post.  Now that I see that in writing, it sounds insanely unlikely to be a quick endeavor, but it doesn't take any additional research, which means no hours of searching and endless rabbit-holes, so I think it's the best plan.  (It is already Friday night as I write this!)

All of these documents are coming from the Baylor University website; I provided the link in my last post if anyone wants to take a look around.  But - a word of caution: Don't do just one search and trust that you've found everything.  

On the Baylor website, you can do a site-wide search, a collection search, and you can open each document and search it individually.  There are two ways to see the search results - look at the thumbnails at the bottom of the image screen, or click on the arrows at the top of the image screen.  Sometimes I found things using the arrows that didn't show up in the search results at the bottom.  Sometimes I found things searching an individual item that I didn't get in the collection or site-wide search.  And, you know how sometimes when you do a search you can just type in a portion of a word and every single word that contains that portion will be highlighted in the search results?  That doesn't work on the Baylor website.  I was just searching for the name "Owen," but sometimes it was misspelled as "Owens" and none of those showed up with my first search.  And then, sometimes a result supposedly popped up, but no word was highlighted in the image!  So, make sure that if you are searching for something - on any website - to put in as many different combinations of keywords and possible spellings as you can, and even then, sometimes you'll just have to browse through the documents yourself in order to find every reference to an ancestor.

As I mentioned before, there are three types of documents on that website that we will be looking at: the annuals of the Southern Baptist Convention, the annuals of the Texas General Convention (all Baptist groups consolidated), and the Baptist Standard Newspaper.  I have gone back and forth and back and forth over how to put the records up - do I go chronologically or one type of record at a time?  Do I begin with the years we have already talked about, or do I start from the beginning and then give stuff away at the end?  Hmmmm.

Okay.  We already know that Erasmus Miller Owen was ordained as a Baptist minister in February of 1882, and that he moved from San Saba to Brown County some time during that same year.  We know that he was active in the Pecan Valley Baptist Association during the late 1880s and early 1890s, which was the association that was involved with the establishment of Howard Payne College, and that he served on the college's board of directors in 1891. (I'm not sure how many years he served in that capacity; all of the catalogs are not online.  I've come across a handful of later newspaper articles telling the history of the college, so maybe next time we'll take a look at those and see what they have to say.)

For some reason, though, he does not show up in the Baptist record collections until 1897, and then only in a couple of newspaper articles.  The first mention of his name in one of the annuals was in 1898:

Texas Baptist Annual
1898

Down in the bottom half of the page we can see, under the PECAN VALLEY ASSOCIATION section, that E. M. Owen was from the town of May.  Now, in case anyone didn't know, both May and the Pecan Valley Association were in Brown County.  But what is this page really telling us?  (And why can't these record books stick the whole title and date at the top of every single page so when we save them into our records we know exactly what we are looking at?)  If we go all the way back to page 74, it tells us what these lists are actually showing:

Ah.  So the list of names was showing exactly which men attended the convention in that year.  This means that we can be absolutely certain that Erasmus Miller Owen was living in the town of May during 1898.  

But, here is something interesting:

This actually came from the 1899 book, but the 1898 book said the same thing - it was just printed strangely with a huge left margin and no right margin.  This tells us that each church was allowed two 'Messengers' to the convention, and in order to send an additional representative, the church would have to donate $25 to the convention.  The town of May sent three representatives, so of course I'm wondering if they were all from the same church.  

That got me wondering how many Baptist churches they had there . . . (rabbit-hole #1: look for the history of churches in Brown County; rabbit-hole #2: look for a history of the town of May).  I couldn't find that information anywhere.  So then I'm wondering what the population of May was in 1900, the closest census year . . .  (rabbit-hole #3: find the 1900 census statistics report for Texas).  Of course the census just lists numbered enumeration districts . . . (rabbit-hole #4: look for census enumeration maps for 1900).  I finally found the maps in microfilm format on the FamilySearch website, but there are hundreds of images without an obvious organization so . . . (rabbit-hole #5: try to find what I'm looking for anyway; rabbit-hole #6: search for some kind of explanation).  I finally clicked on the link, "how to use this collection" which just sent me to a totally unhelpful wiki page, but by scrolling down I found a link to the 1900 census enumeration district descriptions . . .  (rabbit-hole #7: find Texas, find the right supervisor's district, find the right county).  This collection was actually a list of the persons employed as enumerators and which district they were supposed to record.  

So this is what I finally found:

Census Enumeration District Descriptions,
1900 : NA T1210
FamilySearch

This was image 491 of the film containing Texas!  But now we know that in 1900, the enumerator for precinct number 2 lived in the town of May.  That should mean that May was in precinct number 2, because how silly would it have been for the enumerator to have to record data from towns that weren't close to where he or she lived? . . . (rabbit-hole #8: go back and figure out the microfilm with the maps).  It turns out I was right.  There is a big, complicated map, and there is also this nice, easy-to-read map:

1910 U. S. Federal Census
Enumeration District Map
Brown County, Texas

This is for 1910, but other than adding some new towns and dropping at least one off (Trickam in district 6), it seems to match up with the 1900 descriptions.  So now we have to go look at the statistics for that year:

There you go.  The population of the towns of May, Byrds, and Holder - plus any outlying farmsteads- was 2,424 people combined.  (The right-hand column of numbers was for 1890.)  The actual census shows that there were 442 families making up that number.  Now, not all of those people went to church, and not all of them were Baptists, either.  And now it just dawned on me that since I now know that May was probably in precinct 2, I could have just looked at the actual census to see how many ministers there were . . . . (rabbit-hole #9)  There were three, with no denomination listed, and none of the names match the names of the men in the document above, which is from two years prior.  Of course, every single page in precinct 2 looks like this:

1900 Census
Brown County, TX
Precinct 2

On this page you can actually make out a lot of what is smeared in the water-damaged part, but on some of them the ink has been erased completely.  (Maybe this is why we can't find Erasmus on the 1900 census.)  Anyway, I'm guessing that there was only one Baptist Church in the town of May.

Okay.  Now for 1899:

Texas Baptist Annual
1899

Up near the top we see E. M. Owen's name listed as a delegate representing the Pecan Valley Association.  There was a separate list of messengers who were representing individual churches, and the town of May had a man named Smith, which just so happens to be one of the ministers who showed up in precinct 2 of Brown County on the 1900 census.  So this tells us that, although Erasmus was involved with Baptist work at that time, he was not pastoring the church in May.

In 1900 we see him in the convention book again, but this time not as a messenger to the convention:

Texas Baptist Annual
1900

This page is a continuation of the records of contributions to the state mission fund received in October of 1900, which was the month prior to the convention in that year.  You can see the name E. M. Owen a little less than halfway down at the beginning of the twenty-first line.  Unfortunately, this does not tell us where he was living at the time, which is a real bummer since we can't find him on the census for that year.

Then, in 1901, we see him again, but this time not in Brown County:

Texas Baptist Annual
1901

In November of 1901, Erasmus Miller Owen represented the Staked Plains Association at the Baptist General Convention.  Not only that, but he was sent from the church at Emma, which is exactly what we expected to see.

And then there was 1902.  E. M. Owen shows up in multiple pages of the 1902 book.  Here is the first one:  

Texas Baptist Annual
1902

Once again, we see him coming from Emma and representing the Staked Plains Association.  Also, once again, this is a list of messengers, so we know that he actually attended the convention.

His name can also be found on the alphabetical list of Baptist preachers in Texas:

Texas Baptist Annual
1902

There he is, second from the top, right underneath his son Edgar.  Now, both men have a "P" printed after their church, and I had to go to the very beginning of the section to find out what that meant:

Texas Baptist Annual
1902

Aha.  The "P" meant that he was actually the pastor of the church.  I decided to take a look at the alphabetical list of churches, too, because that didn't turn up Erasmus' name in the search results.  I'm glad I did, because it had some really interesting information:

Texas Baptist Annual
1902

Erasmus' name does not appear on this list, because it has the names of the clerks instead.  But look at what it tells us about the church in Emma - it had only seventeen members, and ten of those had been baptized by Erasmus in the preceding year!  (In comparison, the church in May was reported to have had 55 members.)

And look at this:

Texas Baptist Annual
1902

There he is near the bottom of the page, just below his son Conrad.  But what is this a list of?  Well, if you go to the previous page, you will see that it is a list of missionaries.  Missionaries?  Well that makes perfect sense, since Erasmus was pastoring a frontier church that had only about seven members when he went there.  But what is that number that looks like a dollar amount after his name?  It can't be his pay, because there are huge discrepancies between the different amounts.  There was no explanation at the beginning of the list, but I did find a section about "general missionaries" in one of these books, and it said that often times they were sent out to take charge of churches who had lost their pastor; they were supposed to provide direction and revitalize the church.  However, apparently all of the missionaries were also supposed to raise funds for mission work!  I find this quite bizarre, because how is a missionary who is pastoring a church of seventeen people supposed to raise money for missions?  Maybe I am misunderstanding things!

Now, did any of you read the detail of the REPORT ON STATISTICS that I put up above?  It said that the 1902 report was "very superior" to the previous year's report, because many churches and associations failed to turn in their minutes, but that by a lot of letter writing they were able to acquire a satisfactory number of them.  So I thought to myself, well, maybe I'd better go back to the 1901 book and see if it had any statistics about the church in Emma.  This is what I found:

Texas Baptist Annual
1901

Although this says that alphabetical lists of preachers, churches, and Sunday Schools were submitted at the convention, none of those were actually published in the book.  And, even though he said he was going to submit some general summaries provided by the Southern Baptist Convention, it looks like his own summaries were actually printed.  Unfortunately, Emma was not included among the church statistics, so they must have been one of the churches that didn't send in their own minutes.  Perhaps Erasmus was also unable for some reason to attend the fifth Sunday associational meetings of the Staked Plains Association, making his church "not represented" and thus not reported to the convention.  (And now we know why he was listed in the American Baptist Yearbook as still being in Texas during the years he was actually in Oregon!)

Although we would expect him to, Erasmus does not show up in the 1903 or 1904 annuals.  This means that he probably did not attend the convention in those years.  Unfortunately, those books also did not include the same statistical lists as the 1902 book, either.  He is also absent from the 1905 book, and we know for sure that he was in Oregon by the time of the 1906 convention, so it is no surprise that he is absent from the 1906 - 1909 editions as well.  He does show up in two later editions, after his return to Texas, however:

Texas Baptist Annual
1911

There, at the very top, we see that E. M. Owen(s) was one of the messengers from the Fisher County Association in 1911, and that he lived in Rotan and attended the Rotan Baptist Church.  That means that, even though the 1910 census showed him living with his daughter Minnie's family, by the next year he was living with the family of his daughter Clara instead.

The last annual of the Texas Baptist Convention in which Erasmus can be found is the one for 1914:

Texas Baptist Annual
1914

According to page 150 of this book, this is a list of messengers sent by the associations.  The entries show the post office, then church, and then association.  So, Erasmus was sent by the Brown County Baptist Association, from Salem Baptist Church in the town of Bangs.  That means that he was once again living with his daughter Minnie, instead of with Clara.

In the same book, I found this:

That means that the dollar amount listed on the page from the 1902 book is actually showing his salary.  It was far from the least amount paid, but nowhere near a lot of them.  Perhaps it had to do with the type of work or number of churches the missionaries were expected to be servicing.  Erasmus seems to have been the pastor of one tiny little church in a sparsely populated county, so maybe that is why his salary was on the lower end.  

And that is the last mention of E. M. Owen in the Texas annuals.  I think next time we will look at the annuals of the Southern Baptist Convention and see if they match up with what we saw today.  In the meantime, to make downloading of these records easier, I created a folder with the pdfs of all of the books discussed in this post; you can find it here.  I would encourage anyone who is interested in Baptist History to read them because they are . . . well, interesting!

 

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese