What you can find on the Internet is sometimes astounding. I have been looking for the writer of a dozen or so letters from Texas in the late 1850s which are signed only by initials but are located with a county name. I mean looking hard, checking several databases to see if I could find one more or two more letters from this man. Well, last night I went to Ancestry.com and tried the initials with the county and got nowhere. Frustrated, I took the first initial, G, and said, dang it, it is most likely George, though the middle initial is not W. So I put George as the first name with the last name only an initial and WHOOPEE! I nailed the man. Who would have thought that much earlier in Baltimore he had known Edgar Allan Poe? And was writing letters from Texas! But I have not found the particular letter I want, the one he says he wrote about the Runaway Scrape. Onward, and maybe failure, except for rounding up a dozen great letters by a quite brilliant man. I think historians have not used them. I would bet anything no one else would have rounded up a dozen. But is there a place for Texas history online where you can check things like this out?
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