Most of the time, when I begin writing about an ancestor, I have a good idea where the story is going to end. Today, I am sharing a different kind of story – a brick wall – and I’m not sure I’ll ever find the answer.

My husband’s 2X great grandfather, Isaac Sturgell, was definitely a black sheep – married four times and all four wives left him. He died in the Barry County, Missouri county farm in 1909, with no survivors mentioned in his short death notice – although he had 3 surviving children living in Illinois and grandchildren living a few miles away from the county farm.

Isaac was a man on the move his whole life. He never had the opportunity to go to school, born in Virginia, moved to Lawrence County, Ohio with his father when he was about 14 years old. He married there, moved to Barry County, Missouri and then meandered through Benton, Boone, Conway and Pope Counties, Arkansas, Newton County, Missouri and back to Barry County.

However, Isaac Sturgell also had a Texas connection. The mystery is exactly where that connection is.

My husband’s great grandfather, Abjiah Houston Sturgell, was Isaac’s fourth child and second born son and Houston is a name that has continued down in the family right to my husband’s uncle.

Houston is undoubtedly a salute to Sam Houston (1793-1863), who was not only elected as the governor of both Tennessee and Texas and a senator from Texas, but also served as the first and third Presidents of the Republic of Texas.

The fact that Isaac gave the middle name Houston to one of his children, doesn’t prove that there was any other connection to Texas.

On the other hand, census records point to a definite Texas tie – Isaac’s eldest son, Andrew Jackson Sturgell, was born about 1853 in . . . . . TEXAS!

Unfortunately, Jack, as he was known, died before the 1880 census, no death record has been found and, other than marrying four times but leaving no descendants, not much else is known about him. There are definitely no clues pointing to where in Texas Isaac might have moved his family c1853.

What was going on in Texas at the time?

The Portal to Texas History has this excellent map, dated 1853, showing what Texas looked like at the time. Texas is, and was, a big place even in 1853.

By that time, thousands of Southerners were drawn to Texas by the offer of cheap land. Coming from the southwest corner of Missouri, the young Sturgell family would probably have entered the far northeast corner of Texas, but where they might have lived is an unknown. I would tend to doubt that they made it all the way down to, say, San Patricio County, but it isn’t impossible either.

I have searched several times, but have found no hits of the Sturgell/Sturgeon (spelling variation) name on the Portal to Texas history and Isaac’s name isn’t found among those receiving early land grants either.

Did he actually buy land? I don’t know and, even in 1853, there were more than 20 counties. To complicate matters, in the 1850s, there were a number of land districts, such as the Fannin Land District, formed in 1846, but which became the Cooke Land district and Denton Land District in 1854. The 1852 Travis Land District became part of Brown County in 1858.

That’s a lot of records to hunt down – which will take a lot of man hours to research – when there is a possibility that Isaac never bought any land in Texas.

What types of records can I check? In this place and time period, I think military lists, land records and possible tax records are my best bet.

Which counties will I check?

• Anderson
• Angelina
• Austin
• Bastrop
• Bell
• Bexar
• Bosque
• Bowie
• Brazoria
• Brazos
• Burleson
• Burnet
• Caldwell
• Calhoun
• Cameron
• Cass
• Cheerokee
• Collin
• Colorado
• Comal
• Cooke
• Coryell
• Dallas
• Denton
• DeWitt
• Ellis
• El Paso
• Falls
• Fannin
• Fayette
• Fort Bend
• Freestone
• Galveston
• Gillespie
• Goliad
• Gonzales
• Grayson
• Grimes
• Guadalupe
• Harris
• Harrison
• Hays
• Henderson
• Hidalgo
• Hill
• Hopkins
• Houston
• Hunt
• Jackson
• Jasper
• Jefferson
• Johnson
• Jones
• Karnes
• Kaufman
• Kinney
• Lamar
• Lavaca
• Leon
• Liberty
• Limestone
• Madison
• Matagorda
• McLennan
• Medina
• Milam
• Montgomery
• Nacogdoches
• Navarro
• Newton
• Nueces
• Orange
• Panola
• Polk
• Presidio
• Red River
• Refugio
• Robertson
• Rusk
• Sabine
• San Augustine
• San Patricio
• Shelby
• Smith
• Starr
• Tarrant
• Titus
• Travis
• Trinity
• Tyler
• Upshur
• Uvalde
• Van Zandt
• Victoria
• Walker
• Washington
• Webb
• Wharton
• Wichita
• Williamson
• Wood
• Zavala

That’s 102 counties! Rather than going alphabetically down the list, I will start with those in the northeast corner of Texas that borders Arkansas. With young children, and no known FAN club, I doubt that the Sturgells made it all the way down to, say, Starr County and west Texas had few settlers in the early 1850s.