Recycling Our Records
by Tony Hanson
Hopefully you know that we have been busy indexing articles in our Journals, Quarterlies and Newsletters and linking each article to the appropriate image on the Portal to Texas History. We have also created PDF version of each publication that is available on our website to DGS members.
This effort has made me grateful to our earlier members for all of the records they transcribed, and also made me realize that many of the transcriptions continue to have value to genealogical researchers. Transcriptions of early Dallas County Deed records is an example of one such collection.
Dallas County, Texas began recording information about deeds in 1846. Although the records primarily document the transfer of land, they also include information about personal belongings, farm equipment, livestock, earmarks, bonds, probate activities, adjacent landowners, the sale of slaves and witnesses to sales. In many cases the names of family members and surrounding landowners are recorded.
Efforts to transcribe these records began in 1958 when Mrs. W. Graeme Dixon transcribed information from Book A. This information was published by the Local History & Genealogical Society (as the Dallas Genealogical Society was known at that time) in the March 1958 Newsletter.
Robert T. Gill began extracting information from the first five deed books in 1960. This ultimately resulted in his “Cross-file of Grantors and Grantees of Town Property in the First Ten Years of the Town of Dallas, 1846 – 1895” article that was published in the Dallas Genealogical Society in their Quarterly publication in March 1966.
Results from a more coordinated effort to transcribe the remaining records were published by the Dallas Genealogical Society in The Quarterly between 1984 and 1988 thanks to the efforts of a group of Dallas Genealogical Society volunteers led by Clytes A. Cullar. This group published transcripts from Book A through Book E.
Images from the various transcription articles have been assembled into a single PDF file. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been performed to make text specific searches possible, and a Name Index is available at the end of the document.
You can view information about this publication using the link provided below. Anybody can view images of the original articles on the Portal to Texas History. DGS Members can view and download the PDF version of the publication.
