Genealogy and Local History Blog

Monthly Archive: February 2024

Genealogy

Territorial Papers of the United States: A Genealogical Goldmine

The Territorial Papers of the United States are the best-known source of territorial records. The published twenty-eight-volume set of transcribed, indexed, and annotated documents pertaining to the administration of some of the territories of the US covers the Old Northwest, the Southeast, and Midwest: Before a state became state, it was a territory with an appointed territorial governor along a territorial legislature and other governmental offices. And where there is government, there is paperwork: listings of officials, petitions to the government, correspondence of the territorial governor, letters back and forth among governmental officials, slavery issues, Native American affairs, etc. Some History For years, these records were ignored and just housed in various agencies (Department of State, Library of Congress, the then-Department of War, etc.) until the 1911 publication of the Calendar of Papers in Washington Archives of the United States (to 1873) by David W. Parker. The preface to this work laments the...

Local History

“A Diabolical Concentration of Power”: How Home Rule Almost(?) Put Grapevine in Dallas County, 1933-1936

In February 1933 two plans for increased economic efficiency in the organization and working of county and municipal governments were pending in the Texas State Legislature. One was a revised Home Rule Bill presented in the Senate by Frank H. Rawlings of Fort Worth and in the House by R. Emmett Morse of Houston. This bill was originally presented by Walter Beck in 1931 but failed to pass. The second plan, presented to the House by Z. E. Coombes of Dallas, consisted of a resolution calling for the addition of a new section consisting of four paragraphs to Article 5 of the state constitution. The Home Rule Bill focused on modifying Article 9 of the Texas state constitution, which dealt with administration of counties. Its primary purpose was to give home rule powers to counties with populations greater than 60,000. It would add Section 3, the home rule amendment, to...