Offers a guide to census indexes, including federal, state, county, and town records, available in print and online; arranged by year, geographically, and by topic.
A native Georgian, James Hughes Callahan (1812–1856) migrated to Texas to serve in the Texas Revolution in exchange for land. In Seguin, Texas, where he settled, he met and married a divorcée, Sarah Medissa Day (1822–1856). The lives of these two Texas pioneers and their extended family would become so entwined in the events and experiences of the nascent nation and state that their story represents a social history of nineteenth-century Texas. From his arrival as a sergeant with the Georgia Battalion, through the ill-fated 1855 expedition that bears his name, to his shooting death in a feud with a neighbor, Callahan was a soldier, a Texas Ranger, a rancher, and a land developer, at every turn making his mark on the evolving Guadalupe River Basin. Separately, Sarah’s family’s journey reflected the experience of many immigrants to Texas after its war of independence. Thomas O. McDonald traces the pair’s respective paths to their meeting, then follows as, together, they contend with conflict, troublesome social mores, the emergence of new industries, and the taming of the land, along the way helping to shape the Texas culture we know today. With a sharp eye for character and detail, and with a wealth of material at his command, author Thomas O. McDonald tells a story as crackling with life as it is steeped in scholarly research. In these pages the lives of the Callahan and Day families become a canvas on which the history of Texas—from revolution, frontier defense, and Indian wars to Anglo settlement and emerging legal and social systems—dramatically, inexorably unfolds.
William Preston Longley (1851-1878) went on a murderous rampage over the last few years of his life. Once he was arrested in 1877, and subsequently sentenced to hang, his name became known statewide as an outlaw and a murderer. Longley created and reveled in his self-centered image as a fearsome, deadly gunfighter. In truth, Longley was not the daring figure that he attempted to paint.
Acclaim for Doc Holliday "Splendid . . . not only the most readable yet definitive study of Holliday yet published, it is one of the best biographies of nineteenth-century Western 'good-bad men' to appear in the last twenty years. It was so vivid and gripping that I read it twice." --Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University, and author of The New Encyclopedia of the American West "The history of the American West is full of figures who have lived on as romanticized legends. They deserve serious study simply because they have continued to grip the public imagination. Such was Doc Holliday, and Gary Roberts has produced a model for looking at both the life and the legend of these frontier immortals." --Robert M. Utley, author of The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull "Doc Holliday emerges from the shadows for the first time in this important work of Western biography. Gary L. Roberts has put flesh and soul to the man who has long been one of the most mysterious figures of frontier history. This is both an important work and a wonderful read." --Casey Tefertiller, author of Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend "Gary Roberts is one of a foremost class of writers who has created a real literature and authentic history of the so-called Western. His exhaustively researched and beautifully written Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend reveals a pathetically ill and tortured figure, but one of such intense loyalty to Wyatt Earp that it brought him limping to the O.K. Corral and into the glare of history." --Jack Burrows, author of John Ringo: The Gunfighter Who Never Was "Gary L. Roberts manifested an interest in Doc Holliday at a very early age, and he has devoted these past thirty-odd years to serious and detailed research in the development and writing of Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend. The world knows Holliday as Doc Holliday. Family members knew him as John. Somewhere in between the two lies the real John Henry Holliday. Roberts reflects this concept in his writing. This book should be of interest to Holliday devotees as well as newly found readers." --Susan McKey Thomas, cousin of Doc Holliday and coauthor of In Search of the Hollidays
" ... provides updated county and town listings within the same overall state-by-state organization ... information on records and holdings for every county in the United States, as well as excellent maps from renowned mapmaker William Dollarhide ... The availability of census records such as federal, state, and territorial census reports is covered in detail ... Vital records are also discussed, including when and where they were kept and how"--Publisher decription.
From 1869 to 1918 more than 1,200 women lived as prostitutes in Waco, Texas. When the city legalized its red-light district, floozies flocked to Waco where saloons and bordellos boomed. The Oldest Profession in Texas: Waco’s Legal Red-Light District examines the city’s complex stance on prostitution, debunks myths, and unveils (for the first time) the true identities of several early day madams.
Austin Colony Pioneers is a collection of many families that came to Texas in its earliest days and the German settlers and their influences upon the growth of Texas. The book is filled with many anecdotes, short stories, obituaries and articles gleaned from area newspapers. These early families intermarried and not only filled Austin’s original colony but their descendants went to every corner of America. The book traces many of these early pioneers into the present day and also gives their roots before they came to Texas. Colonel William Barret Travis of the Alamo has been a constant element of Betty’s historical research because her family was connected to him in many ways. There are descriptions of persons of historical note such as that of General George Custer and his command of Hempstead, Waller County, after the Civil War. There are stories of towns that once flourished and today are no more. The pages are packed with accounts such as the Bell-Schaffner feud and Shootout in Sealy, Texas and tales of infamous Six Shooter Junction, of Elizabeth Ney, the famous sculptress, and many other historical places and persons of interest.
On a sweltering August night in 1876, Methodist minister William England, his wife, Selena, and two of her children were brutally slaughtered in their North Texas home. Acting on Selena’s deathbed testimony, a neighbor, his brother-in-law, and a friend were arrested and tried for the murders. Murder in Montague tells the story of this gruesome crime and its murky aftermath. In this engrossing blend of true crime reporting, social drama, and legal history, author Glen Sample Ely presents a vivid snapshot of frontier justice and retribution in Texas following the Civil War. The sheer brutality of the Montague murders terrified settlers already traumatized by decades of chaos, violence, and fear—from the deadly raids of Comanche and Kiowa Indians to the terrors of vigilantes, lynchings, and Reconstruction lawlessness. But the crime's aftermath—involving five Texas governors, five trials at Montague and Gainesville, five appeals to the Texas Court of Appeals, and three life sentences at hard labor in the state's abominable and inhumane prison system—offered little in the way of reassurance or resolution. Viewed from any perspective, the 1876 England family murders were both a human tragedy and a miscarriage of justice. Combining the long view of history and the intimate detail of true crime reporting, Murder in Montague deftly captures this moment of reckoning in the story of Texas, as vigilante justice grudgingly gave way to an established system of law and order.