Danielle's people, in the records' own words — from Westphalia and Bern
to the Hill Country town the Johnsons named. Every tale carries its receipt.
Blanco County · 1856
Two Johnson families, one small town
Johnson City was named for James Polk Johnson, a trail-driving cattleman whose uncle was Lyndon Johnson's grandfather — but those were not Danielle's Johnsons. Her Johnsons were in Blanco County a decade earlier: Rev. Samuel Allen Johnson, a Tennessee-born Methodist circuit rider who arrived in 1856 and, per the county's family records, served as Blanco County's first county clerk and later county judge. His grandson James Robert “Bob” Johnson became the longest-serving sheriff in Blanco County history, patrolling the county by horseback from 1906 to 1920 — so when five-year-old Lyndon Johnson's family moved into Johnson City in September 1913, the sheriff keeping the peace in the future president's hometown was Danielle's great-great-grandfather. No kinship between the two Johnson families has ever been documented, and none needs inventing. One family named the town; the other one policed it.
Find a Grave 89265682 & 60328860 (badge photographed) · TXGenWeb Blanco families index · Handbook of Texas · researched August 2026
1861–1869 · a war between them
Samuel and Sarah
Bob Johnson's father never got to raise him. Samuel Allen Johnson married Sarah Jane Page in April 1861, went off to the war, and came back from Louisiana so badly hurt that a New Orleans woman had nursed him back from the edge of death — and in January 1865 he went back to her. Sarah ran a public notice in a New Braunfels newspaper, won a divorce for desertion in March 1868, and married David Trainer that September. A month later Samuel came home to Blanco; family lore says he looked through the window, saw his wife with her new husband, and turned away to his parents' house, where he died the following March, aged twenty-six. His parents buried him with a line that still aches: “This is the eighth grave we have dug for our children. We have but two remaining.” Sarah — who had come up to the Blanco in 1854, aged eleven, the family's proud claim naming her the first girl to live in the county — raised the sheriff-to-be among five Trainer half-siblings, and lies in Blanco Cemetery near her son.
Find a Grave 89265907 & 33070545 (Texas Christian Advocate obituary, 15 April 1869, transcribed) · 1870 Blanco census · researched August 2026
1854 · Round Mountain
Birdtown
Round Mountain isn't just where Danielle's Wolf and Bird people married and are buried — her ancestor built it. Joseph Lewis Bird, a North Carolinian who married Eliza Dorris in Arkansas in 1844, brought his family to the Hill Country and in 1854 put up a log house near the creek in northern Blanco County; the settlement that grew around it was called Birdtown before it became Round Mountain, and his restored cabin still stands. At forty-one he was elected an officer of Company C, 16th Texas Infantry, and served with “Walker's Greyhounds” through the Louisiana campaigns until the division dissolved in 1865 — his last muster card reads “present, sick in quarters.” The 1933 papers remembered him as “the late Judge Bird, who at one time served as county judge of Blanco county.” In 1883 his daughter Susie married Bill Wolf at Round Mountain — a wedding in the village her father founded.
Handbook of Texas (Round Mountain; Blanco County; Walker's Texas Division) · TXGenWeb Blanco Bird family page · Find a Grave 16204556 · researched August 2026
1851 · Westphalia → Texas
Out of Erndtebrück
Christian Wolf was born in 1814 in Erndtebrück, a village on the cold upper Eder in Westphalia's Wittgenstein hills, and in 1851 he and his wife joined the great German exodus to Texas. He wasn't stepping into the unknown: an Erndtebrück man, Louis Martin, had sailed with the first Adelsverein colonists in 1844 and was already the first sheriff of Gillespie County — Christian's village had a Texas grapevine before he ever packed. He settled at Shelby in Austin County, the heart of the German Belt, a “Latin settlement” of educated immigrants that founded its singing society the year after he arrived. His exact ship remains unfound — the free Galveston index holds two 1851 Wolffs, neither him, and Bremen burned its own passenger lists in 1874 — but the outcome is carved in stone: fifty years farming among Germans, death at Shelby in 1901, and a son, William Leonard, sent up-country to become a Blanco County rancher and the grandfather of Johnson City's Wolfs.
Find a Grave 31591238 · Galveston Immigration Database (searched — honest miss) · Handbook of Texas (Germans; Shelby) · researched August 2026
1856 · New Braunfels
The Bernese of Comal County
Johann Kaderli was the odd man out in German Texas: born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1824, he made his life among Prince Solms's German colonists in Comal County, and the German-language Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung is where his Texas life survives. In 1856 — the year he married Fredericka Schnatz — the commissioners court issued a county crowbar and stone hammer to “J. Kaderli, road overseer of the precinct,” and that summer Johann and his brother Jacob signed a printed declaration in a raging neighborhood feud, swearing they had heard a man threatened with lynching on the New Braunfels road. He farmed on the Guadalupe near Cranes Mill, a mill hamlet of about twenty-five souls, where his daughter Mary Frida was born in 1874. Johann and Fredericka lie in Cranes Mill Cemetery above the river — but the community itself is gone, drowned under Canyon Lake in the 1960s. The place Danielle's great-great-grandmother was born can be reached today only by boat, or memory.
Neu-Braunfelser Zeitung, 7 March & 18 July 1856 (Portal to Texas History OCR) · Find a Grave 26775302 · Handbook of Texas (Cranes Mill) · researched August 2026
1908 · Johnson City
Freda's long widowhood
Cora Mae Arrington's father died the day before her second birthday, in August 1908, leaving his widow Freda with seven children and a newborn eighth. Freda Kaderli Arrington, a Swiss immigrant's daughter from Comal County, had already buried her mother at twenty-one and her father at twenty-seven; now she was thirty-four, widowed, with a houseful. The 1910 census finds her simply: “widowed,” head of household, seven children at home. She raised all eight in Johnson City and never remarried — the newspapers still called her “Mrs. R. Arrington” twenty years on — forty-nine years a widow until she was laid beside Richard in the Masonic cemetery in 1957. When her daughter Cora died in 1980, having outlived two husbands, she was buried beside neither of them: she chose plot F-3, with her mother.
1910 federal census, Blanco County · Find a Grave 59484503, 59484582 & 59484328 · Johnson City Masonic Cemetery transcription · researched August 2026
September 1933
Fifty years from Round Mountain
In September 1933, in the Stevenson home in Johnson City, Bill and Susie Wolf put their wedding on again — “an exact replica,” the paper said, of the ceremony performed fifty years earlier at Round Mountain, the village Susie's father had founded. All six children and every grandchild came. In the crowded parlor was “Charles Wolf and children” — Charlie, a widower of two years, his three little girls in tow, the youngest a four-year-old named Oleta Jewel — and among the guests, the widow Frida Arrington, grandmother of a seven-year-old boy in San Antonio named Curtis White Jr. No one in the room could know it, but the two old families shaking hands that afternoon would be joined within a generation, when that girl married that boy — Danielle's grandparents.
Golden-wedding feature, 1933, clipping preserved on Find a Grave 86076737 — read in full, August 2026
1941–1945 · USMC
The sergeant on the stone
Curtis Nicholas White Jr. was sixteen years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and nineteen when the war ended. Somewhere in between, the Detroit-born, San Antonio-raised Texan joined the United States Marine Corps — a service that fought its entire war across the Pacific. His enlistment papers and muster rolls sit behind archive walls, so the record says only what his government headstone in Victoria's Evergreen Cemetery says, and it says enough: SGT — US MARINE CORPS — WORLD WAR II. He came home a sergeant, and by the 1950 census he was a carpenter for the sulfur company at Newgulf. Six months later, his son was born.
Grave marker, Evergreen Cemetery, Victoria (Find a Grave 195601171) · SSA record · 1950 census, Wharton County · researched August 2026
Newgulf · 1950
The company town
The town where Danielle's father was born in October 1950 belonged, right down to the dirt, to the Texas Gulf Sulphur Company — the enumerator who counted Newgulf that spring noted on the census sheet itself that “the land is owned by the Texas Gulf Sulphur Company.” Newgulf sat on the Boling Dome, which would out-produce every other sulfur mine on earth: eighty million tons of sulfur pumped up molten through eight thousand wells. Around four hundred company houses, a company hospital, a movie theater, four churches, and a nine-hole golf course made up the town. Curtis White Jr. appears there in the 1950 census, twenty-four years old, working a forty-hour week, his occupation coded carpenter and his industry coded to the mine. Six months later, Curtis Nicholas White III arrived — a company-town baby, registered in Wharton County.
1950 census, Newgulf, Wharton County (page image + enumerator's note) · Texas Birth Index 1950 · Handbook of Texas (Newgulf; Boling Dome) · researched August 2026
1931 · a name carried on
Jewel
Danielle's grandmother Oleta was three years old — by two weeks — when her mother died. Jewel Elizabeth Johnson Wolf was twenty-seven; the paper wrote that she left “a husband, three small daughters, mother, and several brothers and sisters,” and the smallest of those daughters carried the loss in her own name: Oleta Jewel. From age six she was raised by her stepmother, Bashie Medders, whom the family's obituaries credit plainly — “upon marriage with Charlie, Bashie became the mother of three daughters.” Oleta grew up, married a Marine sergeant, and raised Danielle's father. When she died in 1980 she was laid in plot D-7 of the Johnson City Masonic Cemetery — the same plot where her mother had been waiting since 1931.
1931 death notice, clipping preserved on Find a Grave 86076676 · Llano News, 13 April 2005 · Johnson City Masonic Cemetery transcription · researched August 2026
1958 · the social columns
“And son of New Gulf”
In 1958 the Fredericksburg Radio Post's country correspondents twice noted a visiting car from the coast: “Mr. and Mrs. Curtis White Jr. and son of New Gulf, visiting her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Wolf.” One line, twice in a year — and it is the only place in the public record where Danielle's great-grandparents' ranch, her grandparents' marriage, and her seven-year-old father all stand in a single sentence. The sulfur town and the sheep-and-goat country were some hundred and seventy miles apart, and the family drove it for several days in January and again over a spring weekend. Small-town papers printed such things as news; today they read as the family's heartbeat.
The Radio Post, 9 January & 24 April 1958 (Portal to Texas History OCR) · researched August 2026
Johnson City · 1913–1966
Her people in the president's hometown
You can tell the whole story of Danielle's people in Johnson City without once borrowing the president's family tree. When five-year-old Lyndon Johnson's family moved into town in 1913, the sheriff was her great-great-grandfather Bob Johnson — no relation — fourteen years the county's lawman on horseback. In April 1961, three months after LBJ became Vice President, her great-grandfather Charlie Wolf won a seat on the Johnson City school board with 213 votes — the district that had graduated LBJ in 1924 — and the new board's attorney was A. W. Moursund, the Johnson City lawyer who two years later held the sitting president's power of attorney. Charlie's youngest daughter took her 1966 diploma from a school by then renamed LBJ High. And the town's Masonic cemetery, block after block of it, is the family's own ground.
National Park Service (LBJ Boyhood Home) · The Radio Post, 13 & 27 April 1961 · LBJ Presidential Library · Find a Grave 270241117 · researched August 2026
Blenheim, Ontario · 1926
You were right about Canada
You told this register that your mother's side had something to do with Canada. Two exhaustive searches of Texas had already failed to find your mother's birth, and nobody could explain why. Canada explained it.
Your grandmother was CATHARINE ESTELLE COLEMAN, and she was born on 16 September 1926 in BLENHEIM, ONTARIO — a small town in southwestern Ontario, well over a thousand miles from the Hill Country. Her federal record names her own parents in the same breath: Ernest Melville Coleman and Estelle Morton Guthrie. That is two more generations of your family who had never appeared anywhere in this register, and they arrived because of one sentence you passed along.
Her life ran a long way. Born in Ontario; issued a Social Security number in MINNESOTA, so she was working in the States as a young woman; married Frank Charles Miles; and living at Rolling Meadows, outside Chicago, when she died on 5 August 2000. Then she went home. She is buried at Mount View Cemetery in Cambridge, Ontario, beside her mother — who had died back in 1948, when Catharine was only twenty-two — and beside her father. Frank lies there too, and her stone names him: “Beloved Wife of Frank Charles Miles.”
The record that finally tied all of it to you was her obituary, in a Chicago-area paper in August 2000. Among the family it lists is a daughter — Barbara White, of Austin, Texas. Your mother. That single line is what connected a woman born in Blenheim in 1926 to a marriage licence issued in Travis County in 1979.
And it turned out to run deeper than one grandmother. Your grandfather Frank was Canadian too — or his people were. His own obituary calls him the “son of Canadian immigrants, Nelson and Ethel (nee Mennill) Miles,” and those two lie in White Oak Cemetery in Middlesex County, Ontario, two hundred kilometres west of where Catharine is buried. So BOTH sides of your mother's family came out of Ontario, from opposite ends of it, and met somewhere in the middle of America. Buried beside Nelson and Ethel is a Shirley Miles who lived from 1922 to 1926 — a sister Frank never met, gone at four, two years before he was born.
One footnote, and it has a happy ending. Whitefish Bay — the Canadian place the family remembers — is not where any of these records put them; that is Blenheim and Cambridge. We searched Whitefish Bay's birth register and its cemeteries and found nothing at all, which left only one honest reading: that it was somewhere your people WENT rather than somewhere they are written down. You confirmed it. So both memories are true and they are simply different kinds of true — Blenheim is where your grandmother began, and Whitefish Bay is where the family went. Records can tell you the first. Only you could tell us the second.
Frank C. Miles obituary, Daily Herald, published 19 June 2011 (names his parents, his Navy service 1943–46, his forty years at Palatine, and Catharine as his wife of 53 years) · Find a Grave 186931958 (Nelson) and 186931337 (Ethel Jane Mennill Miles), White Oak Cemetery, Middlesex County, Ontario · SSA NUMIDENT birth-town record, Blenheim ON (names Ernest M. Coleman and Estelle M. Guthrie as her parents) · Find a Grave 183476188 (Catherine, stone reads “Beloved Wife of Frank Charles Miles”), 183476189 (Frank), 241806342 (Ernest), 241806516 (Estelle), all Mount View Cemetery, Cambridge, Ontario · obituary, Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL) 8 Aug 2000, corroborated by the Chicago Tribune notice of 9 Aug 2000 — located through ObitsArchive's keyword index, which returns the notice only when every term is present in the body, and falsified by control queries · researched August 2026
Johnson City · 1928–1980
Oleta came home
Your grandmother was born in Johnson City on 23 October 1928 and named Jewel for her mother — who died three years later, at twenty-seven. Oleta and her five brothers and sisters were raised in part by a stepmother, Bashie Lou Medders.
She married the boy from down the street. The 1930 census puts Curtis White Jr., aged four, on a Johnson City street with baby Oleta a few houses along; twenty years later they were a married couple in a company town three hours away, and your father was born that October.
Her own death certificate is the record that gives her back to us as a person rather than a date. Asked her usual occupation, it says BEAUTICIAN — she did hair, for a living, for most of her working life. By 1980 she was living out at the lake, at Logan's Seabreeze Estates near Buchanan Dam, and she died there on 14 July, aged fifty-one. That is young. Her mother had died younger.
She had married twice more after Curtis, and the second of those is why the state's records file her under a name nobody in the family would recognise — Oleta Jewel Alexander. It took a sweep of every Oleta Jewel who died in Texas across thirty-five years to be certain the woman in that index was yours.
But the last fact is the one worth keeping. They brought her home. She is buried in the Johnson City Masonic Cemetery, in plot D-7 — her father Charlie Wolf's plot — a few minutes from the house she was born in, and near the mother she barely got to know.
Texas certificate of death, state file 56394 (read directly at full resolution: name, 14 July 1980, Llano County / Buchanan Dam, Logan's Seabreeze Estates, marital status divorced, occupation beautician, b. 23 Oct 1928) · Find a Grave 63676383, Johnson City Masonic Cemetery, plot D-7 · Texas death index 1965–1999 uniqueness sweep · Burnet County divorce records · 1930 census, Johnson City · researched August 2026
