Who are these babies?

LUTHER DISHMAN SON OF R.W. & MARY EATON BORN MAR. 16, 1886 DIED OCT. 31, 1886

SARAH BELL DAU. OF R.W. & MARY EATON BORN APR. 20, 1888 DIED FEB. 6, 1890

Dallas Morning News Historical Archives

In 2005 a new resource became available to those of us who research Dallas local history. I used this resource on a personal family research project in the fall of 2005. In 2006 I have used it to great advantage in researching the Webb Chapel families. I've located information that I would have never stumbled across in years of reading microfilms.

The Dallas Morning News (DMN) has scanned their newspaper from 1885 through 1977. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology was used to make the scanned articles searchable. You can type in a search term or phrase such as a name, place, or event and the system will give you a list of hits on your search term(s). You can limit the search by date or by type(s) (article, marriage, birth, and death). The Dallas Morning News Historical Archives are available on the DMN website. Searches are free, but you will have to pay to look at the articles. If you are lucky enough to live in the city of Dallas and have a Dallas Public Library card, it is my understanding that you can access this system for free from the Dallas Public Library website. If like me, you don't live in the city of Dallas, but live close enough to visit the library, you can access the system for free from any Dallas Public Library location and pay a $.25 per page fee for anything you print.

Wow! The more articles I find, the more I think of to look for. I keep a log of all the articles I find. As I log the article, I put the month and year of the event in each person's record in the Webb Chapel Descendant Database. As I have time, I transcribe and evaluate each article and place it and the data I've gleaned into the database. For copyright and identity protection reasons, the transcribed articles will not be available in the online database, but the factual data will be. If you'd like to know more about the articles I may have found on your family, you can contact me at the email address below. I've uploaded an updated version of the database containing the first wave of this information. I'll be working on this for many months to come.

One of the most poignant results of this research for me has been to finally confirm the identity of two babies buried in the cemetery. They are Luther Dishman Eaton b. 1886 and Sarah Bell Eaton b. 1888. According to their tombstones they are the children of R. W. and Mary Eaton. There are no other Eaton family members buried at Webb Chapel, nor had I found any other families connected to the Eaton family. Using the DMN Historical Archives, I was able to locate obituary articles on a Robert W. Eaton who was a Dallas County Commissioner. One of those articles stated that his wife's name was Mera Dishman! Knowing the custom of using the mother's surname as the middle name of a child made this a very likely match. I was able to locate Mera's obituary and the obituaries of three of her four children. Using this information, I looked in the 1900 census and there they were smack dab in the middle of all the other Webb Chapel families. Mera was shown as having 6 children with 4 living. Looks like a match to me! I have also discovered that Luther and Sarah's brother Robert W. Eaton, Jr. was the Dallas City Tax Assessor and Collector, and their sister May married Thomas J. Marsh, a descendant of the pioneer Marsh family in Dallas County for whom Marsh Lane is named. It makes me so happy to know that these babies now have a family.