Preserving history

GONZALES — There’s much history residing in Gonzales, that’s for sure. The houses, the storefronts, the artifacts and legacy tell quite a story.

But there’s much more than that. It lies collected in books and binders chronicling this town’s history as it was written. A building or a cannon only means so much if nothing is written about it.

Lucky for ancestry aficionados, one woman and an organization has taken a fancy to Gonzales County’s records and has decided to preserve and display these important manuscripts as long as the digital age will last.

Judy Lynn Turner is holed up in the rear of the Gonzales County Courthouse Annex silently turning pages and clicking photos of page after page of documents. On the day she described her project, she was flipping through the pages of a hotel registry.

“Howerton House, W.A. Howerton, Proprietor” read the letterhead. One page in particular caught the interest of those assembled, clearly a work of art by the doodler of that time.

“New Year, 1877” was stenciled in large script across the page. “Monday, Janry 1.”

And underneath, the perfect penmanship of whomever was checking in the guests that day.

“I’ve always wondered what brings people from New York to Gonzales,” during that time, Turner said as she studied some of the names and towns they traveled from. “What’s going on?”

Turner is a professional genealogist and is working with the Texas State Genealogy Society (TSGS) to record these documents. With an assist from the organization FamilySearch.org — a genealogy archiving arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Utah — she is able to turn all of these records into .pdf files that will be searchable online for anyone willing to look.

The system is fairly simple: a camera is attached to an arm overlooking a black matte board. Two document-appropriate lights point to it. A document is laid on the matte and a photo is taken by pushing the space bar on a laptop that is connected to the camera. A picture is made of the document and saved to a file. It’s as fast as turning a page and clicking a button.

The best part — aside from the historical achievement — is that the service is totally free to the county.

Family Search had visited here before, in 1977, to document what they could. As Turner said, a lot has happened since then and is calling in a team to help her with this monumental task.

“I realized the vast number of records here in the annex in the County Clerk’s department is a whole lot more than what I can digitize and handle,” she said. “So I called Family Search and told them we have over 200,000 records that [they] didn’t touch in 1977. So we are working with them to get a Family Search team down here to do what in six months or so what’s going to take me 10-15 years.”

Turner admits to being a bit of a history nerd. She has family ties to the Zumwalt, Ponton, Davis and Kent families here in town, thus her fascination with the community’s tales. When she was presented this opportunity from the genealogy society to go anywhere in the state she chose, that’s why she came here.

“Coming here and researching, I have found records of my family and I know how valuable those are to me, and as I digitize all of the other records I realize the value that I am providing everybody else,” she said.

“And with Gonzales being the birthplace of the Republic of Texas, what better place to start the Texas Records Digitization Initiative. So here I am.”

The benefits to others that may be trying to get into societies like the Daughters or Sons of the Republic of Texas will be immensely helped by this project. To gain admission, one has to show a direct link that a kinfolk was indeed part of the beginning of the state. With these records soon searchable, the process will be much easier for these candidates.

“It’s a huge job. But I love it,” she said. “It is a wonderful opportunity. I have found so many things that tie this entire community together and in traveling with TSGS over the past couple of years I’ve met a lot of people.”

It should be noted that Turner is a volunteer and drives in a day or two a week from Placedo. She has a regular job and fortunately for Gonzales, her employer is sympathetic to her hobby of history preservation.

So once a set of documents are scanned and she has a quantity to send Family Search, they send thumb drives and postage at no charge for her to send back to Utah. Soon, they will be searchable on the Family Search website and she estimates that she has already shipped 5,000 documents to them.

“There’s a whole slew of people that help with this,” Turner said.

And to them, a city owes its thanks.