Join us starting at 10:30 for hospitality and mingling. The business meeting starts at 11:00, followed by our featured speaker around 11:30.

Steven Butler is a Dallas native whose family first came to Texas in 1846 and then arrived in Dallas in 1891, unless you count his third cousin six times removed, John Neely Bryan, who got here some fifty years earlier.

Doctor Butler is an Associate Professor of History at Richland College in Dallas and Collin College in Plano. He earned his Ph.D. in Transatlantic History at the University of Texas at Arlington. In his capacity as historian and writer he has contributed ten articles since 1989 to Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas and presented two papers at the annual Dallas History Conference. Sixteen of his articles have been published in the U.S. History textbook currently being used by Richland College students. In 2004 his book From Water Supply to Urban Oasis was used as the basis for the permanent displays at the White Rock Lake Museum. In 1998 Doctor Butler was an unpaid but credited advisor to the PBS documentary The U.S.-Mexican War and in 2006 he appeared in a documentary about the State of Fair of Texas called “A Fair to Remember.” From time-to-time he shows up on KERA-TV (Channel 13) whenever the station needs to fill ten-minutes and uses his “Art and Seek” program appearance about the art of Fair Park, which originally aired in October 2009.

In addition and more importantly in regard to this presentation, Doctor Butler is an experienced family historian (a term he prefers to “genealogist”) who has spent as much of his spare time as he could over the past forty years tracking down his ancestors.

HOW TO FIND YOUR ENGLISH CONVICT ANCESTOR

During the Colonial period, largely after 1718, some 50,000 convicts were “transported” in chains to America to relieve the pressure on England’s overcrowded prisons. Most of these unwilling immigrants ended up as indentured servants in the tobacco colonies. In this presentation, Professor Steven Butler will relate how he unexpectedly found his own convict ancestor and will show you how you can use the Internet to see if you have a “black sheep” in your family tree too!