You all can go to H---, I'm going to Texas

 This week we switch over to my wife's, Sharon's, side of the family.

As I learned after I married into the Reagan-Lackey-Womble clan, you could go just about anywhere in Texas and wind up finding someone she was related to. This is natural, considering many people in the southern and southeastern states seemed to have followed at least the second half of the Davy Crockett quote and headed for Texas in the 1800s.

And a quick glance at Sharon's side of the tree shows a number of relatives who started out in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. And though it's not a southern state, many came from Missouri. If you ask Google where most of the immigrants to Texas came from in the 1820s, it will tell you, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri. 

In the early part of the century, many of these immigrants came to the state either by traveling the Mississippi River, presumably exiting in one of the states to the east and then heading our direction, or by the "Old San Antonio Road," which departed from St. Louis, "crossed the Arkansas River at Little Rock Ford, crossed the Red River, then on into Louisiana, [and] entering Texas on the other side of the Sabine River." (From an article posted on familysearch.org.)

Prior to Texas Independence, the Mexican government recruited people to come to the state, employing "empresarios" to recruit settlers. Perhaps the most famous of these empresarios, to Texans anyway, was a fella by the name of Stephen F. Austin. I think he has a city named after him or something.

Of course the problem with bringing in all these settlers was that at some point they decided they didn't much care for how the Mexican government ran things. This eventually led to a dust-up that began near Gonzalez, Texas, birthplace of the famous "Come and Take It" flag. Seems the Mexican army wanted the town's cannon, and the town refused to give it to them, saying if the army wanted it, they could, well, you know.

After famous battles in San Antonio, where Davey Crockett died, and on the San Jacinto plain near modern-day Houston, immigration began in earnest. From 1836 to 1845, when Texas joined the union, about 135,000 settlers arrived, most probably hoping to receive a land grant of almost 1,300 acres.

Some of Sharon's relatives settled in Bosque County, while others found their way to the Panhandle, where we often ran into their descendants during our sojourns their. 

Next week, I'll do a little name dropping. Seems one of Sharon's forebears was involved in two battles of the Revolutionary War, one of which was commemorated on a postage stamp.