Texas Genealogy

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Texas Genealogy Research Guide

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Texas Genealogy Research Guide

Quick Facts

Texas is the only state that entered the Union as an independent nation, and the terms of that bargain still govern its records. When Texas was annexed at the end of 1845 it kept its public lands — and its public debt — so every original title to Texas soil, from the first Spanish grant onward, is held by the state rather than by the federal government. Six sovereigns, an enormous colonial and Republic-era paper trail, and 254 counties make Texas one of the richest and most jurisdiction-dependent states in which to trace a family.

• Capital: Austin. The Republic’s government sat in turn at Washington-on-the-Brazos, Harrisburg, Galveston, Velasco, Columbia, and Houston before moving to the new town of Austin in 1839; during the Archive War of the 1840s the government decamped to Houston and Washington-on-the-Brazos while the archives stayed behind, and Austin was confirmed as the permanent capital by popular vote in 1850.
• Statehood: December 29, 1845, the twenty-eighth state, admitted from the sovereign Republic of Texas; the Republic formally transferred power to the new state government on February 19, 1846.
• Counties: 254 — more than any other state. The 23 Mexican municipalities became the first counties in March 1836. Kenedy County, created in 1921, was the last established, and Loving County, reorganized in 1931, was the last organized.
• Land type: Texas is a state-land state, and the most emphatic one in the country. Because it retained its public domain at annexation, there are no federal General Land Office or Bureau of Land Management records for Texas at all. Spanish, Mexican, Republic, and state grants alike are held by the Texas General Land Office in Austin; only after a patent issued did a tract pass into the county deed books.
• Nickname and motto: the Lone Star State; the state motto is Friendship, from the Caddo word tejas, meaning friends or allies.
• Where records live: most genealogical records — deeds, marriages, probate, and naturalizations before 1906 — are kept by the County Clerk, while divorces, felonies, and civil suits are kept by the District Clerk. Statewide birth and death registration is held by the state health department and did not begin until 1903.

Libraries and Archives

Texas research divides between Austin, which holds the state government records and the land grants, and the big-city libraries whose genealogy collections rank among the best in the country; county courthouses and a statewide network of regional depositories hold the local records. The principal Texas repositories include:

• Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC, Austin) — the state archives: Republic Claims, Confederate pension applications, Adjutant General service records, the Nacogdoches Archives, county tax rolls, convict record ledgers, the 1867 voter registration, vital-statistics indexes, and microfilm of county records. Its genealogy guide is the best starting point, and much of the material is free on the Texas Digital Archive.
• Texas General Land Office, Archives and Records (Austin) — the indispensable Texas repository: every original land grant issued by Spain, Mexico, the Republic, and the State, together with the translated Spanish Collection, the German immigration contracts, survey field notes, and historic maps.
• Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center (Liberty) — the State Archives’ regional center and the historical resource depository for the ten southeast Texas counties.
• Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin — the Bexar Archives (1717–1836) and the Laredo Archives, the Adelsverein and German colonization papers, the Texas Jewish Historical Society collection, and the WPA slave narratives.
• Family History Research Center at the Clayton Library Campus (Houston Public Library) — one of the largest genealogical collections in the country, especially strong for Texas, the neighboring states, and immigrant origins.
• Dallas Public Library, Lloyd DeWitt Bockstruck Genealogy Collection — a very large open-stack collection covering Texas and every other state.
• Fort Worth Public Library, Genealogy, Local History and Archives — newspapers, obituaries, and family and county histories for North and West Texas and the wider Southwest.
• Galveston and Texas History Center at the Rosenberg Library — immigration and early vital records for the port city through which most nineteenth-century arrivals passed.
• East Texas Research Center (Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches) — the transcribed Nacogdoches records and deep East Texas manuscript holdings.
• Texas State Genealogical Society — the statewide society, with lineage certificates, a quarterly journal, and a directory of local societies.
• Texas State Historical Association — publisher of the free Handbook of Texas, the standard encyclopedia of Texas people, places, colonies, and events, and of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly.
• National Archives at Fort Worth — federal court and naturalization records, immigration and border-crossing manifests, and Bureau of Indian Affairs records for Texas and the surrounding region.
• Catholic Archives of Texas (Austin) — microfilm of the earliest sacramental registers, which are the most important pre-1903 vital records in the state.
• The FamilySearch Library and its worldwide FamilySearch Centers hold microfilm and digital copies of most Texas county records, and the State Archives administers a system of Regional Historical Resource Depositories at libraries and universities across the state, each holding microfilmed county records for its own region.

Major Websites

These sites host digitized Texas records and indexes. Subscription sites are marked ($).

• FamilySearch — free; the backbone finding aid, with the FamilySearch Wiki, catalog, and large digitized collections of Texas vital, county, church, probate, tax, land, and military records.
• Ancestry ($) — extensive Texas vital, census, land, naturalization, military, tax, and voter collections.
• MyHeritage ($) — Texas vital records, tax rolls, censuses, and newspapers.
• Findmypast ($) — Texas marriages, county tax rolls, and border-crossing manifests.
• The Portal to Texas History — free; the University of North Texas digital library, with the Texas Digital Newspaper Program, county and municipal records, General Land Office historic county maps, and the digitized session laws.
• Texas Digital Archive — free; the State Archives’ digitized record series, including Confederate pension application files, Republic claims, military rolls, and the Nacogdoches Archives.
• Texas General Land Office Land Grant Database — free; searchable by grantee, with images of the original grant files.
• Texas Vital Statistics (Department of State Health Services) — free indexes and the ordering point for certified copies.
• Galveston Immigration Database (Galveston Historical Foundation) — free; a name index to immigrants landing at Galveston from the 1840s into the 1940s.
• Fold3 ($) — Texas death certificates and Confederate service records.
• Internet Archive and HathiTrust — free; digitized Texas histories, law books, and published record abstracts.
• Chronicling America — free; the Library of Congress newspaper archive.
• Find a Grave and BillionGraves — free; cemetery listings, photographs, and transcriptions.

Law and Government

Texas has been governed under Spanish, Mexican, Republic, Confederate, and United States law, and the statutes explain why particular records exist — why Protestant marriages turn up in Catholic registers, why a widow already owned half of her husband’s estate, and how much land a settler could claim in a given year. The foundational texts are digitized and free to read.

• Gammel’s The Laws of Texas, 1822–1897 — the single most useful legal source for Texas genealogy, reprinting the Mexican colonization laws, the decrees of Coahuila and Texas, the acts of the Consultation and of the Republic’s Congress, the constitutions, and every session law through 1897; free on the Portal to Texas History and also on the Internet Archive.
• Constitutions of Texas, 1824–1876 — free scans and transcriptions of the Mexican federal constitution of 1824, the constitution of Coahuila y Texas, and the Texas constitutions of 1836, 1845, 1861, 1866, 1869, and 1876, with the convention journals and debates that produced them.
• Laws and Decrees of the State of Coahuila and Texas (Kimball’s translation) — the colonization and civil law in force while the empresario colonies were being settled; free on the Internet Archive.
• Dallam’s Digest of the Laws of Texas — a compilation of the land laws with the early opinions of the Supreme Court; free on the Internet Archive.
• The Revised Statutes of Texas — the codified law of the later nineteenth century, governing probate, marriage, guardianship, and recording practice; free on the Internet Archive.
• The Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas entry on land grants is the quickest way to understand which colonization and headright law applied to a given grant.
• The Legislative Reference Library of Texas hosts digitized session laws and a searchable legislative archive, and the State Archives legislative records hold the original bills, resolutions, and convention papers.

Vital Records (Birth, Marriage, Death)

Statewide registration of births and deaths began in 1903, and compliance was poor for the first two or three decades, so a great many early-twentieth-century births were never recorded at the time. Large numbers were registered years later as delayed certificates — often called “probate births” — when a person needed proof of age for a pension or a passport, and these are worth searching separately. Marriages, by contrast, are county records and reach much further back, to the creation of each county and, for the original counties, to 1837. Before 1836 only the Roman Catholic Church could lawfully solemnize a marriage in Texas, so Protestant couples appear in Catholic parish registers, and some lived under a bond until a priest could reach them.

Texas has no separate city vital-records jurisdiction, but a handful of localities registered earlier than the state did: county recorders were briefly required to record births and deaths in the mid-1870s, and several larger and coastal cities kept their own registers before 1903. Records are held by the Texas Department of State Health Services and by the county clerk. Birth records are restricted for 75 years and death records for 25 years, after which they become public; more recent records are released only to qualified applicants such as the person named or an immediate relative. Use these indexes to identify a certificate, then order a copy:

• Births (statewide, from 1903): the Texas Birth Index, 1903–1997 is free on FamilySearch and also on Ancestry ($); certificate images for the earliest three decades are free on FamilySearch and on Ancestry ($).
• Marriages (county, from 1837): Texas, County Marriage Records is free on FamilySearch with images; the same material is on Ancestry ($) and MyHeritage ($), and the statewide Texas Marriage Index ($) runs from 1824 into the recent past. The original license, bond, and minister’s return stay with the county clerk.
• Deaths (statewide, from 1903): the Texas Death Index, 1903–2000 is free on FamilySearch and also on Ancestry ($); Texas Deaths, 1890–1976 is a free FamilySearch collection with images, and the certificate images for 1903–1982 are on Ancestry ($). Later deaths are indexed on MyHeritage ($).
• Divorce: from 1837 to 1841 a divorce required a special act of the Republic’s Congress; the district courts have had jurisdiction ever since, and the decree is with the district clerk in the county where it was granted. A statewide index begins in 1968 and is free on FamilySearch.

For the whole period before 1903, church registers, cemetery records, county tax rolls, and probate files carry the burden of proof.

History and Timeline of Major Events

Key dates that shaped Texas jurisdictions and records:

• 1519 — Alonso Álvarez de Pineda maps the Texas coast for Spain.
• 1682 — Missions are founded at Ysleta and Socorro near El Paso, the oldest continuously occupied European settlements in Texas.
• 1685 — La Salle plants the French colony of Fort St. Louis on Matagorda Bay, prompting Spain to occupy East Texas.
• 1690 — The first Spanish mission among the Caddo of East Texas is established.
• 1718–1731 — Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) and the Presidio San Antonio de Béxar are founded in 1718; Canary Islanders establish the villa of San Fernando de Béxar, the first chartered civil settlement, in 1731.
• 1749–1755 — José de Escandón colonizes the lower Rio Grande, founding the villas that include Laredo.
• 1821 — Mexico wins independence from Spain; Texas becomes Mexican territory, and Stephen F. Austin begins his colony.
• 1824–1825 — Texas is joined to Coahuila as the Mexican state of Coahuila y Texas; the colonization laws open Texas to empresarios, and Austin titles his first “Old Three Hundred” families.
• 1830 — The Law of April 6 tries to halt Anglo-American immigration and deepens the quarrel with Mexico.
• 1835–1836 — The Texas Revolution: the fight at Gonzales in October 1835, the fall of the Alamo on March 6, 1836, the Goliad massacre, and the victory at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836.
• March 2, 1836 — Texas declares independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos and becomes a republic; that same month the 23 Mexican municipalities are reorganized as the first counties.
• 1837 — The General Land Office is created to gather in and administer all Texas land titles.
• 1839 — The capital moves to the newly laid-out town of Austin.
• 1841–1844 — The Republic contracts with new empresarios — Peters, Fisher and Miller, Castro, and Mercer — to settle the frontier.
• 1844–1847 — The German Adelsverein lands thousands of colonists at Indianola and founds New Braunfels in 1845 and Fredericksburg in 1846.
• December 29, 1845 — Texas is annexed as the twenty-eighth state and keeps its public lands; the Republic transfers power on February 19, 1846.
• 1846–1848 — The Mexican–American War; the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo fixes the Rio Grande boundary and brings the trans-Nueces country and the El Paso district fully into Texas.
• 1850 — The Compromise of 1850 settles the western boundary; Texas gives up its claims to territory now in New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.
• 1854–1859 — Two Indian reservations are laid out on the Brazos and its Clear Fork; in 1859 their residents are removed north into Indian Territory.
• 1855 — A fire destroys the Adjutant General’s office records, taking with it most proof of Republic military service apart from the 1835–1836 muster rolls.
• February 1, 1861 — Texas secedes and joins the Confederacy.
• June 19, 1865 — General Gordon Granger proclaims emancipation at Galveston: Juneteenth.
• 1865–1870 — Reconstruction. The Freedmen’s Bureau operates in Texas, the voter registration of 1867 is compiled, and Texas is readmitted to the Union in 1870.
• 1876 — The present state constitution takes effect, restoring the county courts and setting the framework of county government still in use.
• 1881–1888 — The old Capitol burns in 1881; its replacement is completed in 1888, paid for with three million acres of Panhandle land that became the XIT Ranch.
• 1900 — The hurricane of September 8 destroys much of Galveston, the state’s leading port, and remains the deadliest natural disaster in United States history.
• 1901 — The Spindletop gusher near Beaumont opens the oil era and draws a new wave of migrants into the state.
• 1903 — Statewide registration of births and deaths begins.
• 1910–1920 — The Mexican Revolution drives large-scale immigration across the Texas border.
• 1921 — Kenedy County is created, the last of the 254.

Courthouse fires are a persistent hazard in Texas, and many counties have lost some or all of their early deeds, probate files, or marriage books. Where a county’s records are gone, the General Land Office grant file, the state’s copies of the county tax rolls, and the district court minutes are the standard substitutes, because a copy of each was sent to Austin.

Census Records and Substitutes

Federal censuses were taken every ten years, and Texas first appears in 1850, five years after annexation; it is enumerated in every census from 1850 through 1950. They are free on FamilySearch and on the National Archives 1950 census site, and are also searchable on Ancestry ($) and MyHeritage ($). Texas is one of the few states for which pieces of the burned 1890 census survive: fragments covering parts of Ellis, Hood, Kaufman, Rusk, and Trinity counties are indexed in the 1890 census fragment collection ($). The 1850 and 1860 slave schedules, the mortality schedules from 1850 to 1880, and the 1890 special schedule of Union veterans and widows are all worth searching as well.

Texas never took a state census. There is no five-year enumeration to fall back on, so the gaps must be filled from Spanish and Mexican padrones, from Republic-era name lists, and above all from the county tax rolls. Working backward from statehood, the useful enumerations and substitutes are these:

• 1867–1869 voter registration: compiled county by county under federal authority during Reconstruction, these lists name white and Black voters alike and are the first Texas records to register freedmen as citizens. Each entry gives name, race, county, length of residence in the state and county, and place of birth. On Ancestry ($), and free on FamilySearch in Texas Voter Records, 1867–1918.
• 1846 poll lists: the men who voted in the first elections after annexation, published as the Republic of Texas Poll Lists for 1846 ($) — in effect a roster of adult male citizens by county at the moment of statehood.
• 1840 tax rolls: the fullest Republic-wide name list, long used as a census substitute and published as the 1840 Census of the Republic of Texas. It names taxable men county by county with their land, livestock, and slaves.
• 1837–1845 tax rolls: the Republic’s county tax rolls begin as soon as each county organizes and continue unbroken into the twentieth century, which makes them the closest thing Texas has to a running census (see Tax Records below).
• 1828–1836 Mexican padrones: municipal censuses taken by the ayuntamientos of San Antonio de Béxar, Nacogdoches, San Felipe de Austin, Goliad, and the other municipalities, listing household, age, occupation, marital status, religion, and place of origin. Many survive in the Bexar and Nacogdoches Archives, and translations are printed in Residents of Texas, 1782–1836.
• 1826 Atascosito census: an enumeration of the settlers on the lower Trinity who lay outside the empresario colonies.
• 1824–1836 registers of families: each empresario kept his own register of the families he admitted. Stephen F. Austin’s is the fullest, and these registers, together with the character certificates that accompanied a colonist’s petition for land, are the nearest thing to an arrival record for the Mexican period.
• 1780s–1820s Spanish padrones: censuses of Béxar, La Bahía, Nacogdoches, and the outlying ranchos, and the 1757 censuses of the Rio Grande villas — Laredo, Dolores, Revilla, Mier, Camargo, and Reynosa.

Many of these scattered lists are gathered into the Texas Compiled Census and Census Substitutes Index, 1820–1890 ($). Where the tax rolls fail, city directories and the General Land Office grant files remain the best way to place a family in a particular county in a particular year.

Church Records

Because civil registration came so late, church records carry the weight of Texas vital records for the whole nineteenth century and everything before it. The Roman Catholic Church was the established church and, until 1836, the only one that could lawfully marry anyone, so its sacramental registers — baptisms, marriages, and burials kept at the missions, presidios, and parish churches from the 1700s onward — are the earliest and richest Texas records of families, and they name Protestants and enslaved people as well as Catholics. After independence the Baptist and Methodist churches grew fastest and were the largest Protestant bodies by the late 1800s, with substantial Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Disciples of Christ followings; German, Wendish, Czech, and Polish immigrants brought their own Lutheran and Catholic congregations.

• Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Antonio Sacramental Records, 1700–2000 ($) — the deepest Texas church collection, reaching back to the mission era and covering much of central and south Texas.
• The Catholic Archives of Texas holds microfilm of early sacramental registers for several dioceses; individual dioceses and parishes hold their own books, and the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston — whose predecessor diocese once covered the entire state — holds records from about 1840.
• U.S., Southern Baptist Church Records, 1750–1899 ($) includes Texas congregations; the Texas Baptist Historical Collection and the Baptist seminary and university libraries hold minute books, membership rolls, and associational records.
• New Mexico and Texas, Select United Methodist Church Records, 1870–1970 ($); the Center for Methodist Studies at Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University, is the denominational archive for Texas.
• Texas, Church Records, 1852–1994 is free on FamilySearch, and thousands of individual congregational registers are catalogued by county and town in the FamilySearch Catalog.

Records of closed Lutheran congregations are held by the regional synod archives. The Wendish church at Serbin and the German, Czech, and Polish parishes of central and south Texas kept their registers in their own languages — a useful reminder that the language of a church book usually identifies the community that produced it.

Court Records

Texas courts were reorganized three times — under Mexico, under the Republic, and again during Reconstruction — and knowing which court held which jurisdiction in a given decade tells you which clerk has the file. Two county officers hold nearly everything of genealogical value: the County Clerk and the District Clerk.

• Alcalde and ayuntamiento (to 1836) — under Spain and Mexico the alcalde served as judge, recorder, and notary; his proceedings, wills, estate settlements, and land papers survive in the Bexar, Nacogdoches, and Laredo Archives.
• District Court, since 1836 — the principal trial court: felonies, divorces, land-title suits, larger civil cases, adoptions, and, before 1906, many naturalizations. The District Clerk keeps the minutes and case files.
• County Court, since 1836 — probate, guardianship, misdemeanors, and smaller civil matters; the County Clerk keeps the records. County courts were abolished in 1869 and their business passed to the district courts until the constitution of 1876 restored them, so records for those years are often with the district clerk.
• Commissioners Court — the county’s governing body rather than a trial court, but its minutes record road overseers, bridges, schools, county paupers, and the appointment of officials, and they name a great many ordinary residents.
• Justice of the Peace courts — small claims, bonds, and inquests, which are often the only source for a cause of death before 1903.
• Supreme Court of Texas, since 1836, and the Court of Criminal Appeals, since the 1870s — the appellate records are at the State Archives. Many Supreme Court case files from the 1840s and early 1850s are lost, but dockets, minute books, and a plaintiff-and-defendant index survive.
• Federal courts — Texas was organized as a single federal judicial district in 1846, sitting at Galveston, and was later divided into the eastern, western, northern, and southern districts. Case files and federal naturalizations are at the National Archives at Fort Worth.

Criminal and institutional records can also place a person and describe him: the Texas Convict and Conduct Registers, 1875–1954 ($) give each prisoner’s physical description, birthplace, occupation, and next of kin. County court records for most Texas counties have been microfilmed and are searchable through the FamilySearch Catalog and the State Archives.

Ethnic/Minority Records

Texas was settled in distinct national blocs, and the community a family belonged to usually determines which records will name them.

• Tejanos and Mexican Americans. Spanish-speaking families have lived in Texas since the early 1700s, concentrated at San Antonio, along the Rio Grande from Laredo to Brownsville, in the Nueces country, and in the El Paso district. The colonial-era records are the Bexar Archives (1717–1836) and the Laredo Archives at the Briscoe Center, and the Nacogdoches Archives at the State Archives, digitized on the Texas Digital Archive; the General Land Office’s translated Spanish Collection and the Catholic sacramental registers carry the families forward. The State Archives maintains a Mexican American genealogy guide to this material.
• Germans. The “German belt” runs from the coastal counties through Austin and Fayette counties into the Hill Country — Industry, Round Top, New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, Comfort, and Boerne. The Adelsverein’s German immigration contracts, signed at Bremen and bearing each emigrant’s own signature, are in the General Land Office; the Sophienburg Museum and Archives in New Braunfels and the Briscoe Center hold the society’s papers. Passenger and settler lists are printed in A New Land Beckoned, covering 1844–1847 ($) and 1847–1861 ($).
• Alsatians. Henri Castro settled more than two thousand Alsatian and Rhineland colonists in Medina County from 1844; Castroville remains the center of the settlement, and its parish and county records are the primary sources.
• Wends (Sorbs). A Lutheran congregation from Lusatia founded Serbin, in Lee County, in the mid-1850s. The Texas Wendish Heritage Museum and the registers of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church there document nearly the entire community.
• Czechs and Moravians. Czech families settled among the Germans in central Texas from the 1850s — Fayetteville, La Grange, Praha, Hallettsville, and West. The Texas Czech Heritage and Cultural Center in La Grange and the Czech Heritage Museum and Genealogy Center in Temple hold the published passenger lists, parish transcripts, and family files.
• Poles. Silesian immigrants founded Panna Maria in Karnes County in 1854, the oldest permanent Polish settlement in the United States, with daughter colonies at Cestohowa, St. Hedwig, and Bandera; the Catholic parish registers are the essential source.
• Norwegians and Swedes. Norwegian settlers clustered in Bosque County around Norse and Clifton, and Swedes around Austin and Round Rock; the local museums and Lutheran congregations hold their records.
• African Americans. People of African descent were brought to Texas under Spain and Mexico and in far greater numbers by Anglo planters in the cotton counties of East Texas and the Brazos and Colorado bottoms; emancipation was proclaimed at Galveston on June 19, 1865. The essential records are the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules, the Texas Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records (free on FamilySearch), the 1867–1869 voter registration ($), and the deed and probate books in which enslaved people were recorded as property. The State Archives’ African American genealogy guide, the African American Library at the Gregory School in Houston’s Freedmen’s Town, and the WPA slave narratives at the Briscoe Center carry the record into the twentieth century, as do the histories of the freedom colonies — the independent Black settlements founded after emancipation.
• Jewish Texans. Jewish families were in Texas from the Republic era, and the Galveston Movement of 1907 to 1914 brought roughly ten thousand more through the port and dispersed them across the West. The Texas Jewish Historical Society, whose collection is deposited at the Briscoe Center, and the congregational and communal archives of Galveston, Houston, and Dallas are the leading resources.
• Indigenous peoples. The Caddo confederacies held East Texas, the Comanche and Kiowa the plains, the Lipan and Mescalero Apache the west, and the Karankawa, Atakapa, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Wichita peoples the coast, the south, and the center. Two reservations were laid out on the Brazos in 1854 and their residents removed to Indian Territory in 1859, so federal Indian agency records for most Texas tribes are filed under Oklahoma agencies and held at the National Archives at Fort Worth. Three tribes remain in Texas: the Alabama-Coushatta in Polk County, the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe near Eagle Pass, and Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, the Tigua, at El Paso, whose community dates to the 1680s. For the colonial period, mission registers are often the only records that name Indigenous individuals.

The Library of Congress Texas local history and genealogy guide gathers further ethnic and community resources.

Immigration and Naturalization

Immigrants reached Texas by two very different routes — by sea at Galveston, long called the “Ellis Island of the West,” and overland across the Mexican border. Both produced federal records, but with significant gaps.

• Before 1846 Texas was a foreign country and its ports were not subject to United States passenger law, so no federal passenger lists exist for the colonial or Republic periods. Colonists of that era are documented instead by empresario registers of families, character certificates, and land-grant files.
• Galveston and the Gulf ports. Federal customs lists survive from 1846; almost nothing survives for the 1870s and 1880s, which is a serious gap, and regular lists resume in the 1890s. The federal immigration station opened at Galveston in 1906. Texas, Passenger and Crew Lists Arriving at Various Ports, 1896–1951 is free on FamilySearch and Texas, Arriving and Departing Passenger and Crew Lists, 1893–1963 ($) is name-searchable; the free Galveston Immigration Database indexes arrivals from the 1840s to the 1940s drawn from manifests, published lists, and newspaper shipping columns. Indianola, on Matagorda Bay, was the second great landing place — especially for German colonists — until hurricanes destroyed it.
• The Mexican border. Systematic recording of border crossings began early in the twentieth century at Laredo, El Paso, Eagle Pass, Brownsville, Del Rio, Hidalgo, Rio Grande City, and Presidio, and the Mexican Revolution pushed the numbers sharply upward. U.S., Border Crossings from Mexico to U.S., 1895–1964 ($) is the main index, and FamilySearch has free manifests for Laredo, El Paso, and Eagle Pass among other ports.

Naturalization. Before 1906 any court of record could naturalize, so a Texas declaration or petition may sit with the district clerk, the county clerk, or a federal court; after 1906 the process was federalized. Texas, Naturalization Records, 1852–1991 ($) draws county and federal records together, and Texas Naturalization Records, 1906–1989 is free on FamilySearch; the federal originals are at the National Archives at Fort Worth. For the Mexican period the closest equivalent is the Character Certificates in the General Land Office of Texas ($) — testimonials of good character required of every immigrant who petitioned for a land title, giving his place of origin, year of arrival, occupation, marital status, and family.

Land Records

Land is the heart of Texas genealogy. Because Texas kept its public domain when it joined the Union, there are no federal land-entry files for the state; instead the Texas General Land Office, created in 1837, holds every original grant made by Spain, Mexico, the Republic, and the State from the 1720s onward in one unbroken archive. A grant file typically contains the application, the proof of character or of heirship, the surveyor’s field notes, and the patent, and it will often state where a family came from and when they arrived. Only after the patent issued did the land pass into private hands, and every transfer from that point is a deed recorded by the County Clerk.

How the grants are arranged. Files are indexed by land district (roughly the original counties), then by class of grant, then by file number; the free Land Grant Database and Surname Index are searchable by grantee. Texas surveys are described in Spanish measure: a vara is about 33 and one-third inches, a labor is 177.1 acres, and a league (sitio) is 4,428.4 acres — so the classic “league and a labor” comes to 4,605.5 acres.

The empresario colonies of the Mexican era. Under the colonization laws of the 1820s Mexico let empresarios recruit settlers in exchange for premium land. Knowing which colony an ancestor joined tells you which register of families and which land office produced their records.

• Stephen F. Austin’s Colony (1821–1835): the first, largest, and best documented. The original “Old Three Hundred” families were titled in 1824–1825 along the lower Brazos, Colorado, and Lavaca rivers; Austin held five contracts in all and settled well over a thousand families, with his land office and the ayuntamiento at San Felipe de Austin. His Register of Families and the colony’s titles are at the General Land Office.
• Green DeWitt’s Colony (1825): on the Guadalupe, with its capital at Gonzales.
• Martín De León’s Colony (1824): centered on Victoria, the only colony settled predominantly by Mexican families.
• Haden Edwards (1825): around Nacogdoches. His contract was annulled after he tried to dispossess older residents, and the short-lived Fredonian Rebellion followed.
• The Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company (1830): a New York syndicate that took over the East Texas contracts of Lorenzo de Zavala, David G. Burnet, and Joseph Vehlein and sold land scrip in the United States.
• Robertson’s Colony (the Nashville Company): on the upper Brazos, long contested between Sterling C. Robertson and Austin; its papers have been separately published and indexed.
• Power and Hewetson (Refugio) and McMullen and McGloin (San Patricio): Irish Catholic colonies on the coastal bend.

The Republic’s colony contracts. After independence the Republic revived the empresario system for four large frontier grants, whose colonists were filed as third-class headrights.

• Peters Colony (1841): the Texas Emigration and Land Company’s tract across North Texas, taking in present-day Dallas, Denton, Collin, Tarrant, and neighboring counties — the origin of most of the earliest titles in that region.
• Fisher-Miller Grant (1842): some three million acres between the Llano and Colorado rivers, bought in 1844 by the German Adelsverein, the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas. The society never managed to settle the grant itself, but it landed its colonists at Indianola and founded New Braunfels in 1845 and Fredericksburg in 1846; its emigration contracts, signed at Bremen, are among the most personal documents in the Land Office.
• Castro’s Colony (1842): Henri Castro’s tract west of San Antonio, settled from 1844 by Alsatian and Rhineland families at Castroville and through Medina County.
• Mercer’s Colony (1844): Charles Fenton Mercer’s grant on the northern frontier, heavily litigated and eventually annulled, though the settlers kept their titles.

Headrights, bounties, and preemptions. The Republic gave land according to when a settler arrived, so the class of a grant dates an ancestor’s arrival in Texas almost to the year.

• First class: in Texas before March 2, 1836 — a league and a labor (4,605.5 acres) to a head of family, a third of a league (1,476.1 acres) to a single man of seventeen or older.
• Second class: arrived between March 2, 1836 and October 1, 1837 — 1,280 acres to a head of family, 640 acres to a single man.
• Third class: arrived between October 1, 1837 and January 1, 1840 — 640 acres to a head of family, 320 acres to a single man.
• Fourth class: arrived between January 1, 1840 and January 1, 1842 — the same amounts as third class; the Republic’s colony contracts were filed under these two classes.
• Bounty grants: 320 acres for every three months of military service, to a maximum of 1,280 acres, for service in the Revolution and for enlistment before October 1837, with 240-acre bounties for frontier duty between 1838 and 1842.
• Donation grants: 640 acres for taking part in a particular battle — the siege of Béxar and San Jacinto — and to the heirs of those who fell at the Alamo and at Goliad. Veteran donation acts of 1879 and 1881 granted further land to surviving veterans of the Revolution and to signers of the Declaration, and an act of 1881 issued Confederate scrip for 1,280 acres to permanently disabled Confederate veterans and to the widows of soldiers killed in service.
• Preemption (“squatter”) grants: 320 acres, later reduced to 160, for settlers who occupied and improved vacant public land for three years; issued from 1845 to 1856 and again from 1866 to 1898.
• School, university, asylum, and railroad lands: the state sold and granted the remaining public domain to endow its institutions and to subsidize railroad building. The last great transaction exchanged three million acres of the Panhandle — which became the XIT Ranch — for the Capitol completed in 1888.

An 1855 fire destroyed the Adjutant General’s files and with them most of the proof of Republic military service, so a Court of Claims was created in 1856 to hear the claims of men who had been entitled to land but never received it; its case files are a good genealogical source in their own right. Online, the free FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed Texas deeds searchable by every name they contain, including grantors, grantees, witnesses, and neighbors; Texas, Land Title Abstracts, 1822–1989 ($) indexes the abstracts of title; and the Portal to Texas History hosts the General Land Office’s historic county maps, which show every original survey with its grantee’s name — usually the fastest way to find an ancestor’s land on the ground.

Military Records

Texans have fought under six flags, and because the Republic and the state kept their own military records — through the Adjutant General and the Comptroller rather than the federal government — Texas military sources are unusually rich, although the 1855 fire cost the state most of its Republic-era files.

• Spanish and Mexican service: the presidial companies at Béxar, La Bahía, and Nacogdoches are documented in the Bexar and Nacogdoches Archives.
• Texas Revolution and the Republic (1835–1845): the State Archives’ free Texas Adjutant General Service Records, 1836–1935 index links directly to scanned service files, and the free Republic Claims database indexes the claims, pay vouchers, and pension papers that citizens and soldiers submitted to the Republic between 1835 and 1846. Texas Muster Roll Index Cards, 1838–1900 ($) abstracts the surviving rolls.
• Texas Rangers: ranger, minute-man, and mounted-volunteer companies are abstracted in the same muster-roll index cards; the State Archives is the official state repository of Texas Ranger records, and the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum at Waco holds further service material.
• Mexican–American War (1846–1848): service and pension files are federal and held by the National Archives, while the State Archives holds Texas muster rolls and the Mexican War Papers.
• Civil War: Texas Civil War Service Records of Confederate Soldiers and of Union Soldiers are free on FamilySearch. The most valuable Texas-specific source is the Confederate pension applications filed from 1899 by indigent or disabled veterans and their widows living in Texas: the State Archives offers a free pension index and free digitized application files on the Texas Digital Archive, and the same records are on Ancestry ($). Look also for the Confederate Indigent Families lists of the 1860s and the registers of the Confederate Men’s and Women’s Homes at Austin.
• Spanish-American War and World War I: the Texas Volunteer Guard muster rolls are at the State Archives, and Texas WWI Records are free on FamilySearch; the Texas Military Forces Museum at Camp Mabry holds unit histories and rosters for the Texas National Guard.

Probate Records

Probate — wills, administrations, guardianships, and inventories — is among the richest sources for family relationships, and in Texas it carries a peculiarity that catches researchers out. Texas inherited the Spanish law of community property: a surviving spouse already owned half of everything the couple acquired during the marriage, so a Texas will or administration frequently disposes of only the decedent’s half, and the widow’s share never appears as an inheritance at all. For the same reason Texas leans heavily on affidavits and judgments of heirship, which name every heir and the relationship of each and are recorded in the deed books rather than in the probate files — so search both.

• Before 1836: estates were settled by the alcalde, and the papers are in the Bexar, Nacogdoches, and Laredo Archives.
• 1836–1846: the Republic gave probate jurisdiction to a probate court in each county, presided over by the county’s chief justice.
• 1846 onward: the County Court holds probate jurisdiction and the County Clerk keeps the files. Between 1869 and 1876, while the county courts were abolished, probate was handled by the district courts, so records from those years may sit with the district clerk. In the largest counties, statutory probate courts hear these cases, but the files remain with the county clerk.

An estate file usually contains the application, the will or the grant of administration, the bond, the inventory and appraisement, the claims against the estate, and the final account — and, in guardianships, the names and ages of minor children. Online, Texas Probate Records, 1800–1990 is free on FamilySearch and browsable by county, and Texas Wills and Probate Records, 1833–1974 ($) is name-searchable across most counties. FamilySearch Full-Text Search also makes many unindexed wills, estate files, and heirship affidavits searchable by every name they contain.

Tax Records

With no state census to fall back on, the county tax rolls are the most important census substitute in Texas — and they are unusually good ones. A roll begins the year a county organizes and runs annually thereafter. It names each taxpayer and describes his land by original grantee and survey, which ties the family directly to a General Land Office grant file, and it lists acreage, town lots, livestock, carriages, and, before emancipation, enslaved people. Several consecutive years will show when a young man came of age, when a family arrived or left the county, and when a widow or a set of heirs took over an estate. Age exemptions varied from decade to decade, so not every adult man appears in every year.

• Texas, County Tax Rolls, 1837–1910 — free on FamilySearch, browsable for nearly every county and indexed for selected years (each county’s first year, then 1845, 1855, 1865, 1875, 1885, 1890, 1895, and 1905). The same material is on Ancestry ($) and MyHeritage ($).
• The Texas State Library and Archives holds the original microfilmed rolls, including the Republic-era rolls from 1837 and the later rolls that continue past 1910, and lists the gaps county by county.
• U.S., IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862–1918 ($) — the federal income, license, and luxury taxes of the Civil War era and after. Because Texas was in the Confederacy, its federal lists do not begin until the war ended; the earliest Texas assessment lists date from the mid-1860s, and the 1860s and 1870s images are free on FamilySearch.
• Poll tax records of the early twentieth century, kept by the county tax collector, double as voter lists, and delinquent tax rolls often name the heirs of a deceased owner who had let the taxes lapse.