Even those vanity books
Yes, of course, those local histories are mostly vanity books.
You know the ones I mean.
Some of them are prepared by the local Historical Society or local Historical Commission and their primary purpose is to record the history the town wants people — especially potential residents and businesses — to believe.
Some of them are prepared by commercial firms with information that local families submit because it’s what they want people to believe — and that they may even sometimes believe themselves.
And even those local histories contain nuggets.
Little bits and pieces of information that may be just what we need to help nail down something in our own family histories.
Case in point.
My great grandfather Jasper Carlton Robertson worked for a time as a guard in the Texas prison system. His employee ledger reflects that he worked at as many as eight different locations over a period of about as many years.1
As of 1900, he was enumerated in the U.S. census as a guard of convicts at Dunovant’s Camp No. 1, located in Justice Precinct 8, Colorado County, Texas.2
So… where exactly is that?
You see, William Dunovant was one of the biggest landowners in all of Colorado County, Texas, around the time when Jasper was a prison guard — and he hired convict labor to work on his sugar and rice plantations.3 Somewhere on the thousands upon thousands of acres he owned were the camps where Jasper was assigned.
There may be a precise answer somewhere in the land records of Colorado County, or perhaps the tax records. There may be a contract between Dunovant and the state prison system. All of which is important and should be sought out… when there’s time.
But when you’re on a flying trip in to Texas and you’ve got to try to find an answer on the fly, you don’t want to overlook the nuggets wherever they may be found. I may have just a few hours to try to walk the land where my great grandfather served… and narrowing down the location as soon as possible is a priority.
So where do you look?
In every corner.
For every nugget.
I had the great good fortune to spend most of yesterday at Houston’s Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research. It’s a treasure trove of genealogical information ranging from early historical newspapers to — yes — those vanity books.
And in one of those vanity books, a history of the town of Eagle Lake in Colorado County, put together by the Eagle Lake Historical Commission, comes this little nugget.
“Two prison camps were located on the J. U. Frazar Estate, three miles south of Eagle Lake.”4
In one sentence the geography has gone from somewhere on thousands of acres somewhere in Colorado County to one area south of the town of Eagle Lake. Somewhere, I suspect, in the shaded zone on this map.
It isn’t perfect.
But it’s a place to start.
And a place I didn’t have before mining even a vanity book for the nuggets it might contain.
SOURCES
- Texas Prison Guard Ledger 1: 95, entry for Jasper C. Robertson (1893-1900); “Texas, Prison Employee Ledgers, 1861-1938,” Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 6 Mar 2015), citing Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Records 1849-2010, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin, Texas. ↩
- 1900 U.S. census, Colorado County, Texas, Justice Precinct 8 (Eagle Lake), population schedule, enumeration district (ED) 26, p. 224(A) (stamped), dwelling 81, family 83, Jasper C. “Robinson;” digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 24 May 2013); citing National Archive microfilm publication T623, roll 1622. ↩
- William S. Osborn, “A History of the Cane Belt Branch of the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railway Company,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 101 (Jan 1998): 303. ↩
- Eagle Lake Historical Commission, A History of Eagle Lake Texas (Austin : Nortex Press 1987), 116. ↩
Have you visited or talked with the Prison Museum in Huntsville? The are collecting all the old records and ephemera from the history of the Texas prison system.
Working on it, Fran. Doing the local stuff first while I’m in the Houston area.
A vanity book solved the birth order of my Daugherty line and gave the unrecorded marriage date and place for the 9 kids’ folks. I always look for these just in case there’s the answer to my question. I don’t think they are any less error filled than a poorly done census!
Even when they’re wrong, there can still be a nugget or two worth mining!
Good one, Judy. I managed to find the correct placename from a comment in one vanity book about my 2nd great-grandfather, quoting him as saying where HE said he was born even though ‘everyone else’ thought he had been born in the little town [of the history book], in northern NY state. Cool stuff. Of course, they are like many little shiny objects, distracting me immensely. Nuggets indeed.
Excellent, Celia! Glad you got such good info!
In a local history for the little Canadian township where some of my folks lived, I read that the whites’ first school was on my ancestors’ land and that the school had doubled as their congregation’s meeting house before they were able to build a separate building. I chalked it up to “Maybe but I’ll probably never be able to prove it.” And then on the 1851 Canadian census, I found the enumerator’s note: “school house used as a place of worship 24 x 26–hold 15 persons”
That’s neat, Liz! Getting the info confirmed must have been wonderful!
It might be a “vanity book” or a “mug book” as I have heard them called, but those county histories produced around the time of the first Centennial,can be treasures. My immigrant ancestors’ brother’s submission to the History of Dodge County WI 1880 gave his and wife’s birth and marriage dates and places, names of his parents and those of his wife, the names and birthdates of all his many children, the value of his farm, and the migration pattern of the entire family.
Bragging, you bet, as he arrived penniless 30 years before.!
Sounds like he had reason to brag!
At the time of the US Bicentennial, the commission that was supposed to arrange nationwide festivities decided instead to parcel out the funds budgeted for the celebration in the form of grants to individual localities to be used in putting together their own celebrations on the local level. As a result, many New England communities decided to publish local histories (or update ones that had been published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some with extensive genealogical information on prominent local families. From one I learned how the first settlers of a community in northern Vermont made their move from Connecticut in the absence of roads — they waited for winter in order to be able to use the frozen rivers as highways over which to haul their belongings on sledges, which gave me a new appreciation for how tough these people must have been.
There are often real nuggets in those volumes, no question.
I hate to be a negative Nelly, but as valuable as I’ve found some of the old mug books, I’ve sometimes been bitterly disappointed. When they’re good, they’re very, very good, but when they’re bad, they’re horrible!
As I understand it, “our subject” paid to be included and would either be interviewed or fill out a questionnaire. Along the way to publication, the information he provided could be misread or miscopied – especially if handwriting or spelling was poor, or an item was squeezed between lines or into the margin. I’ve seen the maternal and paternal grandparents switched, family members omitted, and names and places confused. You just never know…caveat emptor!
Some can really be awful, Anne — but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some things in those books are solid gold.
As a librarian these “vanity books” are often a place I point patrons towards as a starting place. I always tell them they want to prove whatever they find, but often they have photos that patrons have not have seen before. I saw this when I first started doing genealogy for my family. I found a photo in one of these books and when my mother saw the picture she was amazed because she had the original and didn’t know who the couple was.
Another good reason not to disregard those books, Jennie!
William Dunovant was a business partner with W.T. Eldridge. They then started feuding and Dunovant was shot & killed by Eldridge on a train. J.A. Robertson was one of the administrators handling Dunovant’s estate. Any chance this J.A. Robertson is related to your Jasper Carleton Robertson? Also, you can read about Dunovant on the Lakeside Sugar Refinery and Rice Culture in Colorado County Historical Markers on this site: http://openplaques.org/places/us/areas/eagle_lake_tx
Both markers mention convict labor.
Not the same Robertson, no, and not even the same Robertson family — but definitely the same Dunovant! It’s a great story about business feuding, with Eldridge getting away with murder twice (he was acquitted of killing Dunovant on the grounds of self-defense and then acquitted of killing Dunovant’s brother in law — also on self-defense!).