The Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research is a branch of Houston Public Library in the city of Houston in Texas that was established back in 1968. It holds a very large body of records that are of major utility for anyone studying an ancestor who might have lived in Texas over the last two or so centuries and in particular in the Houston area. The Center also has material which pertains to the wider Gulf of Mexico region in line with Texas’s position in centuries gone by as successively part of the Spanish Empire, Mexico, the Republic of Texas and the United States.[1]
History of Texas and HoustonHistory of Texas and Houston
The records held by the Clayton Library Center reflect Texas’s complex history. Although Spanish explorers had passed through here as early as the mid-sixteenth century, the comparatively inhospitable environment found in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California ensured that the Spanish did not begin to try and establish major colonies along the Sun Belt until well into the eighteenth century.[2] A period of conflict followed, first as Mexico established its independence from Spain in the course of the 1810s and early 1820s, and then as empresarios like Stephen F. Austin settled colonies of American-born individuals in the Texas region in the 1820s and 1830s. These eventually broke away from the oversight of the Mexican government and formed states like the Republic of Texas that had close ties to the United States government.[3]
It was during this latter period that Houston was first settled not far from the Gulf of Mexico in 1837. Its founders were Augustus and John Allen, two New York-born pioneers of American westwards expansion in Texas. They acquired a grant of land at the intersection of Buffalo Bayou and White Oak Bayou and formed the town. After a considerable promotional campaign designed to draw settlers to their burgeoning colony, there were over 1,500 people living in Houston after just a few months. It was named after Sam Houston, the first President of the Republic of Texas, during whose initial term in office the town was founded.[4]
Most records held at the Center pertain to the period after 1848 when Texas was amalgamated into the United States following the American-Mexican War of 1846 to 1848. The population of Texas increased markedly in the 1850s as the region became a major gathering point for people heading out west to join in the California gold rush, picking up supplies and other necessaries in places like Houston before heading across the less hospitable climes of New Mexico and Arizona. Efforts to make Houston a link in the expanding railway network encouraged the town’s growth, though it was stymied by the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.[5]
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A post-war boom saw Houston’s population expand to 16,500 people by 1880, then 44,000 by 1900, reaching 100,000 during the First World War, in part because of refugee overspill from the Mexican Revolution, while Buffalo Bayou, the wide port region in this part of Texas, brought a growing amount of naval passengers to the city. Nearly 300,000 people were living in Houston by the time of the Great Depression in the early 1930s and it reached one million in the early 1960s. And this is only the population of the city itself. Today over seven million people live in the wider Houston metropolitan area, almost one-in-four Texans.[6]
The Clayton Library Center for Genealogical ResearchThe Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research
The Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research is a constituent part of the larger Houston Public Library. Houston Public Library was established in the center of Houston back in 1904 when the sprawling metropolis was a town of nearly 50,000 people. Over time, as Houston has sprawled to become an enormous city of over two million people, and seven million in the wider metropolitan area, the Public Library expanded decade after decade. Today it has nearly three dozen branches around the city and suburbs. The Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research is one of these and came into being in 1968 when a decision was taken to move the considerable genealogical material that had been accumulated in the main library to a separate facility at Clayton House on Caroline Street in the Museum District of Houston. Consequently, for over half a century censuses, directories, civil registration records and a vast range of other genealogical material pertaining to Houston, Texas and even the wider Gulf region have been located at Clayton House. There are over 100,000 research volumes there, back catalogues of over 3,000 journals and periodicals and a very large collection of microfilmed data for genealogical studies.[7]
Genealogical research at the Clayton Library CenterGenealogical research at the Clayton Library Center
The Clayton’s Library Center’s collections are Houston-centric and this should be a port of call for anyone tracing an individual or family member to the city or the area immediately surrounding it. For instance, the Center houses copies of the main demographic records anyone exploring their family history in the region needs to consult, like federal censuses, civil registration records and the like. But it also goes beyond those more generic family history records to ones which are Houston specific. For instance, the original records of many of the larger Houston funeral homes are stored here, along with death records pertaining specifically to the city.[8] There are also voluminous records pertaining to passenger arrivals in Texas’s ports over the last two centuries, especially Houston (Buffalo Bayou) and Galveston. The Center is also home to over two dozen manuscript collections donated to Houston Public Library over the last century or so by prominent Houstonians and antiquarian collectors. A considerable proportion of the records involved are not available elsewhere.[9] Access to tens of millions of birth, marriage and death records in Houston and Texas is available through MyHeritage, as well as obituary records from several Houston newspapers.
See alsoSee also
Explore about Texas and HoustonExplore about Texas and Houston
- Houston Daily Post, Texas, Index of Death Notices, 1859-1989 records collection on MyHeritage
- Houston Informer, Texas, Index of Death Notices, 1919-1969 records collection on MyHeritage
- Texas Births, 1926-1995 records collection on MyHeritage
- Texas Marriages and Divorces records collection on MyHeritage
- Texas Deaths, 1964-1998 records collection on MyHeritage
- Texas Newspapers, 1848-2009 records collection on MyHeritage
- Fundamentals of Researching Texas at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Finding Your Ancestors in the Republic of Texas at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Researching Texas Land and Property Records at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://library.hccs.edu/c.php?g=1064815&p=7872881
- ↑ James M. Daniel, ‘The Spanish Frontier in West Texas and North Mexico’, in The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 4 (April, 1968), pp. 481–495.
- ↑ https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/empresario
- ↑ https://houston.org/timeline
- ↑ ‘Texas and the California Gold Rush’, in Howard R. Lamar, Texas Crossings: The Lone Star State and the American Far West, 1836–1986 (Austin, Texas, 1991), pp. 1–18.
- ↑ https://www.peakbagger.com/PBGeog/histmetropop.aspx
- ↑ https://library.hccs.edu/c.php?g=1064815&p=7872881
- ↑ https://digital.houstonlibrary.org/clayton
- ↑ https://houstonlibrary.org/genealogy