Part One: Cuero

 Looking for people who died 190 years ago is hard. Especially when you don’t know **EXACTLY** when and where they were born, or when and where they died. 

And there are SO MANY THINGS that I do not know about Sidney Gaston Miller Kellogg.

But you have to start somewhere. And I started with Ancestry.com.

In the spring of 2022, I suffered my second retina detachment. All of a sudden, I was unable to crochet. I was devastated, because I faced the loss not only of a hobby and a creative outlet but a way to comfort friends in time of loss and to create gifts. And a way to use up the fidgets and the extra energy in my brain. Really, that was the hardest part. I had all this time, and I had really bad fidgets, and I really really really needed something to do that would satisfy the fidgets. 

And then I remembered something. When I married the first time, I had been given a very special book, “The Anne Of Green Gables Book Of Days.” This was a blank calendar of sorts, with each day containing a quote from or a fact about the Anne Of Green Gables series for every day of the year, along with space to write birthdates and other special days. Over the years I have filled this book with names and dates of births, weddings, and deaths in my family. It is a (mostly) well-maintained treasure. I decided to create something similar for my daughter, who was getting married. Except I would use quotes from Tolkien and Lewis. 

This project quickly overwhelmed me and I have not finished. Alas.

However…it rekindled my love of genealogy study and this! This was something even my broken eyes could see well enough to do. (You can blow up your computer screen to as big as you need to. So there.)

Over the next few years I poked and prodded at my ancestry.com membership, filling in things I knew and learning how to find things I didn’t know. I asked my parents dozens of questions, even taking my nieces on a “magical history tour” of Gonzales to share the things what I had learned. 

But Sidney wasn’t buried in Gonzales. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because we did find a large number of Kelloggs and Millers and we know where a lot of the family is buried.

It wasn’t until the spring of 2026 that I really decided to go searching for Sidney. There wasn’t really a reason except for “Why not?” and “If not now, when?”

So we were off.

And everything was fruitless. Nothing about Sidney anywhere. Dead ends aplenty.

Ancestry doesn’t even agree on when she died. Some entries say 1836, some say that she died in 1837 in Mississippi. (See? It’s frustrating.) I can’t figure out why in the hell she would have gone all the way to Mississippi. As far as I can tell she didn’t have any family there. 

But then I found an article about a historical marker in Cuero, honoring George Washington Davis. And George’s wife Rebecca Gaston Davis.

Sidney’s mother.

Well. That at least was something. 

So I decided to find everything I could find about George and Rebecca. Because maybe somewhere in their papers? Maybe there were hints about Sidney.

Our first trip to Cuero was on a rainy Sunday in April of 2026 (because again, I had gotten sidetracked, but this time it was because of the Artemis II mission and going to the moon, so it felt super duper justified). We were looking for the historical marker honoring George and Rebecca, which is on a highway outside of town. And we drove past it about 6 times before we finally found it because it is just…on the side of the road. Fortunately the internet exists and I could google the exact GPS coordinates of the marker and we did find it eventually. George and Rebecca are buried about two miles from the historical marker, on private land. I wondered at first if perhaps Sidney was buried there too, but since George and Rebecca moved to Cuero in the 1840s and Sidney was gone by then? It’s highly unlikely.

The second trip to Cuero was planned for a Saturday when the museums were open. The first one we visited, The Chisholm Trail Museum, provided more of a wealth of information than I expected. Because books. I walked in and told the docent “Hello, I am ancestor hunting, can you help?” And it turns out that she could. Because this was the Chisholm Trail Museum dedicated to cattle and branding…but I did purchase a book of official records of early cattle brands of Gonzales and DeWitt counties.

George’s brand is a large capital G.

Progress.

The second museum was the Cuero Historical Society. Again I walked in and asked the docent if she could help in my ancestor hunt. She led up to a back room full of boxes of papers—the archive room—and said we were welcome to look around. I started running my fingers along stacks of books and my husband started looking at stacks of boxes. “Hey babe, is this the one we’re looking for?” And he pulled out a box from the shelf. One of the names on the box? “GEORGE WASHINGTON DAVIS” 

There was a whole folder. Including a research paper.

I cried.

I still need to contact her for copies as the copy machine was not working that day. But still.

Papers. Documents. A research paper that told about George’s trip to Texas with Rebecca and her three children…including Sidney.

The search is, obviously, far from over. I’m currently reading three books about Texas history, the Alamo, and the Runaway Scrape, and then using them as jumping off places for more research. 

We will be making more trips to Gonzales, more trips to cemeteries, more trips to the library.

More google searches. More questions. More answers. More learning. More unpacking of what I learned…and did not learn…about Texas history and my own ancestry.

And the unending search for the girl who gave birth in the back of a wagon in the pouring freezing rain in the spring of 1836.

For Sidney.