Chasing Ghosts - Paint Rock to San Marcos

So I spent a bit of time today continuing the hunt for the records of a surveyor named Thomas F. Jackson who died in 1940. On Monday, I stopped at the Paint Rock cemetery first, to see whether any other family members were buried beside Mr. Jackson.

That didn't tell me about survivors. Beside his grave was that of his wife who had died 14 years before him, marked by a fairly fancy marble monument. Hers was from 1926, before the deeds in his name apparently given in lieu of foreclosure in the 1930's. The rest of the plot was vacant.

I searched the probate records, but found no reference to Mr. Jackson's estate.

The real property dealings gave a good clue, though. In the 1930's there were various deeds executed by Thos. F. Jackson et ux, Rena Jackson. His death certificate had listed him as "married" in 1940, so evidently Rena was his second wife.

I ran out of leads in the county records, but the census records filled in some blanks. It turns out that Rena Jackson was his first wife's younger sister, Irene, which was interesting if not particularly helpful at pointing out the trail to the records.

But the census records also identified Thomas F. Jackson's children, one of whom, Ernest, was a librarian at Southwest Texas Teacher's College in San Marcos in 1930, himself with two kids.

Ernest's wife had died in the Austin area at age 95 in 1995, their kids would now be in their 80's.

After trying all the land surveyors anywhere close to Paint Rock and the local abstract company, it looks as if the main prospect is that the librarian son, Ernest, may have arranged to put his father's papers in some historical collection. Hope springs eternal, but the odds in favor of the papers existing are still long.

Interestingly, I've spoken with a couple of my older San Marcos clients who remembered E.B. (Ernest Bryan) Jackson quite well from his days at the college there. So if they exist, the papers may just have ended up somewhere within a stone's throw of Austin.