Do you have ancestors in Old Red River County, Texas?

Question

I've recently started the Early Red River, Texas One Place Study, focusing on settlers on the north Texas frontier before statehood. I've been working on this since the 1960s and presently have info on more than 3,000 individuals, with more than 150 profiles created or tagged so far at WikiTree. (Many more coming, as I can get them typed.)

If you have ancestors from Jonesborough, Pecan Point,  early Clarksville, or the surrounding small communities -- or from the north bank of the river before the Adams-Oñís Treaty and the later Indian treaties -- you're invited to join in!

Michael K. Smith

Comments

I think you should have a Thank you for doing this one-location study ... 

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Hi, Michael!

Thanks for starting this new One Place Study! Can you send me a private message? I'd like to award your project member badge and help you with the setup of the OPS page.

Azure Rae

Answer 1

I’m a Burkham decedent.

Answer 2

My great grandfather [[Morgan-28502|James Monroe Morgan]] married his first wife [[Stephenson-7323|Eratha Stephenson]] in Clarksville, Red River County 18 Dec 1878. Their 2 children Arthur and Lucy Jane were born there.

They moved to Oklahoma Territory about 1890.

Answer 3

UPDATE, 15 May 2022: I've spent much of the pandemic beavering away on old Red River and have just passed personal profile #300 for this One Place Study. Probably 85% of those were created by me. (The rest were started by other people, but most of those had very little at all on the page.) Plus there are another 600 or so new profiles for descendants who don't technically qualify for the project itself but who obviously are connected to it. Many of these folks moved away to other parts of the state. By the way, I don't create profile pages without including all the source material I have, so it can be rather a slow process -- but I regard putting up an empty page with just a name and reference to a second-hand Ancestry tree to be highly NON-useful, so I'm taking my time and posting everything.

Answer 4

Michael, I am researching the Garrett Igo family in Red River as part of the Igo Name Study. They just missed the window for your scope of study, as they appear to have arrived between 1848 and 1850, but I imagine they may appear in your source materials from that point forward.

Do you have any pointers for me on which might be the best place to start? Any help appreciated! 

Comments

Hey, I know them! Garrett Igo marr. Nancy Haggard and they had 11 kids. I haven't created a profile for them yet, but Garret and his family are on my list.

Looks like they arrived in Red River abt 1846, so, yeah, they probably missed the cut-off point (which is statehood). But, as I said, I've also been adding a lot of later Red River folks, up into the early 20th century, as an aid to research, so have at it. (Also, it looks like a couple of their kids may have married people from earlier Red River families.)

I don't know low long you've been doing this stuff, but you might want to take a look at the nearly complete bibliography that I've posted on the One-Place Study page -- especially Pat Clark's The History of Clarksville and Old Red River County (1937), which is the standard -- not 100% correct, of course, but very useful because he descended form James Clark and he knew EVERYONE. (I have a copy of the 1st edition, but the full text of the book is available on Ancestry.)

Where you live matters, too, and how large your local library is, because a great deal of of the original source material on old Red River is not on Ancestry or elsewhere on like. I spent several hundred hours crawling around the courthouse in Clarksville in the '70s & '80s. Libraries like Dallas Public (where I was on the staff for 30+ years) also have large local history collections.'

Mike

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I think I got you covered for Garrett's family - https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Igo-127, I need to work down the tree and add kids and spouses, but you can ignore them and assume I'll handle it. Thanks for the pointers!