Dallas County Texas Minute Book A, 1846-1855, 14th District Court Abstracts

Dallas County was organized in 1846 and the district court met for the first time Monday, 7 December 1846. In these abstracts are to be found the names of the founders of Dallas—as jurors, defendants and plaintiffs—involved in the usual disputes of life.

Minute Book A, 14th District Court, Dallas County, Texas commences on 7 December 1846 and runs through 6 March 1855. The minute books for the 14th District Court from its inception until March 1939 and the extant loose case file papers are available in the Texas/Dallas History Archives Division of the Dallas Public Library in its capacity as a depository for the Regional Historical Research Depository and Local Records Program (RHRD) of the Texas State Library.

14th District Court—Minute Book A; Abstracts was first published serially in the Dallas Quarterly starting in Volume XXXIX, Number 3 (September 1993). As we were abstracting the minutes, we realized that in addition to information on early citizens there was a great deal of information on the early history of Dallas. For this reason, the publications committee decided to publish the minutes as a single book. This allowed us to gather the entries specifically relating to civic affairs of Dallas into one list, which appears as Appendix IV. Many officials were mentioned and they are listed in Appendix I.

In the process of preparing the material for publication some errors in the Quarterly articles were discovered and corrected. For the most part these were of a minor nature involving the spelling or misspelling of names. In the abstracts the names are spelled as we found them in the minutes. In the index, however, we have chosen one spelling in an attempt to put all the entries for one individual together. Every spelling found in the minutes is cross referenced in the index. A family named Sharrock is in these records as Sharock, Sharick, Sharic, Sharruck, Sherock, Shurrock as well as by the correct spelling. This name is indexed as Sharrock but there are entries for all the other spellings indicating that it has been indexed as Sharrock. In some cases it was impossible to determine the most likely spelling and these are indexed as they appear.

Adrienne Bird Jamieson
Helen Mason Lu
Publications Committee, 1994–1995
Dallas Genealogical Society