Hiding in Plain Sight

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 24

Over the past several months, I've been writing posts covering the life of Erasmus Miller Owen during the 1890's.  It sounded like a great plan when I began, but it is turning out to need a whole lot more research during the writing process than I anticipated.  Combine that with the fact that this semester has turned into a real doozy (do people even say that anymore?!), and what we end up with is a line of research into one branch of my family that has been going on for a year and is probably only half-way finished, and currently, a draft of a post begun seven weeks ago that I haven't even been able to work on for more than nineteen days in a row.  

When I started my most recent (unfinished) post, I was like, okay, I am super busy so let me do another "interlude" that will just be throwing up some info that I've gathered.  I came up with a great title, went online to double check something and BOOM!  I found a doctoral thesis that not only fit my title perfectly, but allowed me to go into depth about something that was just going to be a one-paragraph speculation.  Yay!  Or not, because look where it has gotten us.

So, desperate to get a post published but knowing that finishing the one I've been working on is going to take more time than I have and am willing to wait for, I decided to just throw something else up here instead.

Now, I've been trying really hard to stick to the 1890's, but for the sake of feeling like I've accomplished something and maybe not losing all of my readers, we are going to stray from that topic.  We'll still be talking about Erasmus, but we are going to revisit something from a previous post that covers a time in his life prior to the 1890's, which I was hoping to have already gotten to by this point, but . . . . 

So.  Who remembers my post called "Surprise, Surprise" from way back in August of last year?  (If you don't, that's okay.  I only vaguely remembered it myself, and had to go back and read it.  That was actually very helpful since I've been working on the Owens for so long now.  You might want to reread it now too, so I put a link in the title right there, and it will open in a new window so you won't lose your place in this one.)

That post was all about how Erasmus had moved from San Saba County to Burnet County in 1860 and then had moved back to San Saba County again by 1870, but that the Ancestry census agricultural schedule database makes it look like he was in Burnet County way back in 1850, which makes it look like he moved back and forth twice.  Luckily, we cleared that whole mess up.  But that's not the only thing we talked about in that post.  We also asked why he made the move to Burnet County in the first place and we (okay, I, but hopefully you were all on board with it!) speculated that maybe it had something to do with one of Rhoda's pregnancies, and maybe was even related to the death of a child that can be found on the 1860 mortality schedule . . .  named Edgar Owens.

Was this infant the child of Erasmus and Rhoda?  

I knew that the baby had to have belonged to either Erasmus or to the family of W. M. Owen, because those were the only two married Owens on the regular census for Burnet County in 1860.  (If you recall, Erasmus' unmarried brother Elephalet lived there as well.)  But was there a way to determine the identity of baby Edgar's parents with certainty?

At the time, I wrote:

I don't think we have enough evidence to say who the infant Edgar belonged to, but there is a statistical 50/50 chance plus some reasonable arguments that (maybe?) make it even more likely that he was the child of Erasmus and Rhoda.  Perhaps this explains the uncertainty out there over which of Erasmus' wives was the mother of his daughter Rosemary, who died in infancy in 1858.  Many researchers say that Mary Ann died in childbirth and attribute that baby to her.  But others, like my grandmother, have recorded that Erasmus and Rhoda lost their first child as an infant, and name Rosemary as that child.  If the 1858 date that everybody records for Rosemary's birth and death is correct, she had to have been the child of Erasmus and Mary Ann, because Erasmus did not marry Rhoda until September of that year.  Perhaps the fact that Rhoda lost her first child has been remembered correctly, but the actual name of that child has been forgotten.  Perhaps that child was the infant Edgar.

I lamented that this question would have to be filed as another "unsolvable mystery."  (I hate those!  They're like gaping holes in the narrative.  Like pages torn out of a book, or a missing photo in an album.)  Little did I know that the answer was hiding in plain sight!

So there I was, weeks later, doing some mundane daily task that allowed my mind to wander, when it hit me: I can use the same method of comparing the census records that I used to clear up the confusion of dates on the agricultural schedule to solve this mystery as well!  If the census taker was going from household to household with all of his census forms . . . and if he asked his questions and recorded his answers on the agricultural schedule at the same time as the regular population schedule . . . then he would also have asked if anyone in their household had died in the previous year and if they had, he would have recorded that information on the mortality schedule . . . all at the same time . . . which means that the households should all be in the same order no matter which form one looks at.

Wow.  It's ridiculous I didn't think of that sooner, especially because I mentioned in the exact same post that I had solved a mystery concerning my Blackshear ancestor using exactly the same method.  So, at my first opportunity, I sat down at my computer and began making two lists.  The first was for the mortality schedule:

U. S. Census Mortality Schedule
Burnet County, Texas
1860

The second was for the population schedule, which I obviously can't put up here because it is 60 pages long.  Here are the surnames in order from the two sets of documents:

1860 Census Mortality Schedule - Surnames	1860 Census Population Schedule - Head of Household	Family Number & Census Page #
1. no name (slave)	--	--
2. Lockwood	Thomas Lockwood	family 9  (pg. 2)
3. Conner	Adison Conner	family 15  (pg. 3)
or	A. B. Conner	family 24  (pg. 4)
4. Reed	John S. Reed	family 32  (pg. 5)
or	Wm D. Reed	family 44  (pg. 7)
or	H. H. Reed	family 49  (pg. 8)
5. Davidson	John R. Davidson	family 53  (pg. 8)
or	Willis B. Davidson	family 55  (pg. 8)
6. Bell (slave)	--	--
7. no name (slave)	--	--
8. Hunter	Henry H. Hunter	family 73  (pg. 11)
9. no name (slave)	--	--
10. Roberts	John C. Roberts	family 124  (pg. 18)
11. Rogers	Leonard Rogers	family 189  (pg. 29)
12. Harris	J. A. Harris	family 197  (pg. 30)
13. Allen	J. M. Allen*(most likely)	family 214  (pg. 32)
or	George Allen	family 220  (pg. 33)
14. no name	--	--
15. Owens	E. M. Owens	family 222  (pg. 33)
16. Taylor	David Taylor	family 260  (pg. 39)
17. Moore	Thomas Moore	family 270  (pg. 41)
18. Hill	Warren J. Hill	family 272  (pg. 41)
	Wm. M. Owens	family 303  (pg. 46)
19. Addams	No family found (adult immigrant from Ireland – killed by Indians)	--
20. Horne
21. Snow	Abner Snow	family 306  (pg. 46)
22. Horne	no family found, adult farmer	--
23. Nix	Anderson T. Nix	family 319  (pg. 48)
or	John B. Nix	family 320  (pg. 48)
24. Scaggs	Riller Scaggs (F) - (deceased had been head of household – killed by Indians)	family 335  (pg. 51)

(Sorry for the giant boxes in this table.  That's not what it looked like in the draft and I don't know how to fix it.  I also don't know how to get the whole table, and not just the words in it, centered.)

Okay.  You'll notice that I inserted the other Owen family into the second column in the order that it appeared on the regular census.  There is no name in the first column, because that family was recorded after the Taylor, Moore, and Hill families, and there was no matching entry on the mortality schedule.  It just skipped from Hill to Snow, with poor Robert Addams, murdered by Indians, in between.  

So, what does this tell us?  It tells us with certainty that Rhoda and Erasmus had a baby, whom they named Edgar, born in December of 1859, who died of unknown causes when he was only one day old.  It validates my branch of the family's story that their first child died as an infant, and lends credence to the fact that the baby, purportedly named Rosemary, who died in 1858, was the child of Erasmus and his first wife, Mary Ann. 

The strange thing is, I was on FamilySearch a couple of weeks after I figured this out, and I noticed that back in 2012 somebody added a male infant who was born and died in 1858 to Erasmus' information as his first child with Rhoda.  I think this must have come from a family story somewhere that was put on some ancestral file or something, because otherwise why didn't they know the baby's name?  Well, now we do.  So we can all update our trees with the correct information, with Rosemary (1858-1858) belonging to Erasmus' first marriage and Edgar (1859-1859) belonging to his second.  (Now, we just have to convince everyone that having two Edgars with different birth dates is not a mistake!)  

I cannot even begin to tell you how satisfying it is to finally clear up the confusion.  Having conflicting information about an ancestor's family is never fun - not for genealogists, and definitely not for family historians.  Plus, it's always nice to solve a good mystery.  Now if only the other ones could be so easy . . . .

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese