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Chasing Ghosts – San Marcos to the Gulf of Mexico
I spent part of today following up some leads that might yet take me to the survey records of the Thomas F. Jackson who died in 1940 in Paint Rock, Texas, records that should give details of surveys that he made at a particular ranch in about 1914. The census records indicated that Mr. Jackson had a son and a daughter. The son lived in San Marcos in 1940, and had evidently traveled the 200 miles to Paint Rock when his father unexpectedly died at age 74, or so I gathered from the fact that he had signed the death certificate on file in the courthouse in Paint Rock.
The son, Ernest B. Jackson, was the librarian at Southwest Texas State College from 1925 to 1965. This in particular was what gave me reason for optimism that at least some of the elder Jackson’s records might have been preserved. My possibly overly optimistic idea was that librarians tend to be stronger on the organizing than the throwing away. An internet search turned up a letter written from Cotula, Texas to Ernest the librarian by a young teacher named Lyndon B. Johnson, a former student at the college. It also turned up the fact that Ernest had died in 1965 in San Marcos.
I called a couple of former clients who were long-time residents of San Marcos and was gratified to hear both say that they had known E.B. Jackson the librarian at the college. The older of the two didn’t know anything about E.B.’s family when we spoke, but later I got an email from him recommending that I contact a fellow who had worked with Mr. Jackson in the 1960’s before leaving San Marcos to take a job as head librarian at the college in San Angelo.
The other client, who also had grown up in San Marcos, knew E.B. Jackson a bit better. The client’s father and Mr. Jackson had been friends, but all he was able to tell me about Mr. Jackson’s family was basically what the census records had – that and the fact that the daughter had died in the 1950’s. He confirmed that Jackson’s widow had lived into her nineties, passing away about fifteen years ago, but had little information about her. However, he assured me that his sister in Boerne was the family historian and would probably know more.
So I called the sister’s number and left a message, mentioning some of the details of why a surveyor from Austin was calling to bother her about someone who had departed from this life 45 years ago. I also called the telephone number of a man in San Angelo who an internet search had assured me had the same name as the former assistant librarian who had worked with Mr. Jackson in San Marcos in the 1960’s. I rang him up and was pleasantly surprised to learn that (a) that co-worker was still alive and (b) I was talking to him.
While he knew a bit about Mr. Jackson’s family, it was really only that his sons had been alive back in 1965 when Lee had gone back to San Marcos for the funeral. He did suggest a collection at the library at the college in San Angelo that might conceivably be where an odd lot of papers of historical interest would have been deposited and gave me the name of the person in charge of the collection. When I hung up, I sent an email off to the archivist and looked at my empty hands for any other clues.
My luck was with me, though, because after lunch I got a call from the woman in Boerne whose answering machine had taken a message from me earlier. Yes, she was able to tell me a bit about the family, confirming that E.B.’s widow had lived in San Marcos and that the daughter had died as a young woman in child birth. She knew that both of the sons lived in a city on the Texas coast and that they themselves had children.
That turned out to be a pretty good lead. After an internet phone book search and one “number no longer in service”, a woman answered who was the daughter-in-law of E.B. Jackson, former librarian at Southwest State Teacher’s College. She was actually interested in talking about her husband’s grandfather and thought that her husband had a metal box with some of Thomas F. Jackson’s papers in it. Fortunately for me, I was able to tell her some things about her husband’s grandfather, including his place of birth, that neither she nor her husband knew, so there were the makings of a fair exchange.
Her husband was away at the time, but she said he’d give me a call tomorrow. Until then, the contents of that metal box are in a quantum state. There is about a 50% chance that they actually contain something useful to the object of my search.
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5 Replies
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Outstanding, Kent! Keep bulldogging it and let us know the results. It may not mean much to those outside of Texas, but I am following this with worms on my tongue (ie: baited breath).
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> Outstanding, Kent! Keep bulldogging it and let us know the results. It may not mean much to those outside of Texas, but I am following this with worms on my tongue (ie: baited breath).
I concur. I find it interesting and enjoy reading about it and seeing the photos. It’s like a hunt of some sort and very exciting when you find pieces to it and share it with us.
PS: I have some beautiful cemetery photos I took a few years back of our local old 1800s cemetery. I can post if you’d like to see them. 🙂
Admins Wife -
In a weird way it almost – almost – doesn’t even matter if that box has anything useful for you. Just the fact that you took all of these research steps and posted them here is pretty cool in and of itself. But it sure would be some icing on the cake to score some old survey docs.
Cheers, Kent.
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good work Kent.
it looks like you have a few avenues to investigate.I know here there are a few cartons of old field notes by the old Parish surveyor which are stored in a corner of a local attorney’s office. I never asked how he got them.
I found out by talking to an abstracter that I work with at times.
It reminds me of the Pilie’ research that you got me involved with years back.
The local Pilie’ that I found turned out to be an adopted son of the lineage and he did not know much about the family even though his family lived in an old Pilie’ estate along a beautiful Bogue Falaya river here in town.
I still have all the info that I was researching in New Orleans.
I would like to continue it one day.
If I remember, the next avenues to search was the Archdiocese records for baptism and death records and try to locate a copy of a old New Orleans French newspaper which had an account of a ‘incident’ that Lil’ Joe was involved with in the Marigny section of New Orleans in the early 1800’s.
It sounded like a ‘crapaud’ game may have gotten out of hand. -
The thing about using census data and such other records as are available on line is that you get just a very blurry snapshot of the person’s circumstances every ten years or so. It’s just enough to make me wonder about the missing pieces.
For example, Thomas F. Jackson was born in 1866 in Hopkins County in Northeast Texas, probably near the post office of Black Oak. His father, Anderson Jackson, had been born in Tennessee in about 1831, his mother, Setha, in Alabama that same year. Jackson’s first wife was a woman named Bessie (Elizabeth Sarah) Franklin who evidently had been born in Comanche County, Texas as had her sister, Rena (Irene), eight years younger than she, although their parents were from England and Indiana.
Thomas F. Jackson had evidently been working as a teacher in Comanche County when he and Bessie were married in 1891. Five years later, in 1896 when their first child was born, they remained in Comanche.
Sometime between 1896 and 1907, Thomas F. Jackson decided to practice land surveying in Concho County, possibly just to supplement his work as a teacher.
His first wife died in 1926, after her children had moved away. Thomas F. Jackson remained in Paint Rock and married the younger sister Rena. Rena had been married at age 20 in 1894 to a fellow from Tennessee named Repps McDaniel, the town druggist or one of them, in Comanche City, where Rena and Bessie had grown up. By 1910, Rena had apparently been widowed and was living in the town of Nara Visa in Quay County, on the eastern edge of New Mexico. She was working as a typesetter in a printing office to feed herself and her three kids.
One of her sons, Franklin Repps McDaniel, died in El Paso County, Texas in 1963.
So far, I haven’t discovered where Rena Franklin McDaniel Jackson went after her second husband, Thomas, died.
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