The First Glimpse

I asked my father about our family history and he came up with two initial stories.  One, the story of our ancestor shooting a sheriff and the second about an old broken pistol that was hidden under the floor board of his house.  I was intrigued.  Dad said he never knew much about the family history.  His grandfather had died in a wagon on the way from Encinal to Palestine.  He had died in a small town of Tanglewood and his widow found the people to be so nice, she settled there.  Because of this death, very few stories of the Owens family were told to him.  I was so interested in this and encouraged, nay prodded, into my genealogy that I signed up for an ancestors website, and there, to my amazement, was a narrative that described my great great grandfather, William Swinton Bennett Owens.  I read this narrative many times and had to overcome my initial shock...he was a slave owner.  This information was unknown to me.  The stories I had heard of my father's childhood of working in the fields, picking crops for pennies on the bushel, selling watermelons on the road were stories of poverty.  The Owens were "dirt farmers", with little money.  I had negated the possibility that the Owens owned another human, they had no money.
But there it was, so easily mentioned that William Swinton Bennett Owens gathered up his family and his slaves, Horace, Hagar and George and moved to Uvalde.  And they were young.  Horace, the oldest was 17 years old.  Hagar only 13 years old and little George was 9 years old.  That night I tossed and turned.  Just young children, no mother.  I woke up with so many questions I had no idea where to start.  Looking back I know my focus was still researching my family.  This would prove to be helpful, for in order to find the slave, you must find the owner.  A harsh fact I learned early on in my searching.