Bastrop County, Texas

09/24/2026

Back to 2025 and there have been at least 2 elections since then., where 1 vote can matter in local elections. State wide voter registrations by DPS.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19SQL1YQMb/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Over the past 24 hours, Texas county voter registrars across the state have received a flood of new voter registrations and updates to voter registration records submitted through the Texas Department of Public Safety. Some of these submissions date as far back as October 2025, but were not sent to Texas county voter registrars until this week. In Bastrop County, we received approximately 2,000 records to process as a result of a technological error at the state level that caused this major backlog. Bastrop County voters should be confident that county election officials are working around the clock to ensure valid voter registrations submitted in a timely manner before the deadline will be processed appropriately, despite the challenges and additional time that this backlog has created. We encourage Bastrop County voters to verify their registration status by visiting www.bastropvotes.org or by contacting our office at 512-581-7160 to verify that their current voter registration information is updated and on file ahead of the October 5th deadline.

09/15/2026

🎉 Thank you for following this page!

09/15/2026

Nightly visitor to my fowl pen area. They, coyotes, raccoons and others are all around in Bastrop County, waiting to get unprotected animals.

07/28/2026

Keep an eye out folks!!! If you see these farm implements contact the Bastrop Sheriff's Department. They had to have a long trailer to get both the tractor and the baler. If you have a camera on 812, 304, 20 or 21, please look at today's pictures (7/27/2026). Of course they could be hiding them near the location it was stolen from.

Living in Bastrop County
Sandy Holder
·
Does anybody have any cameras within the 812/Hop Holder Lane vicinity to check for a stolen tractor and baler. Russell Klaus had his John Deere tractor and yellow Vermeer baler at our house, baling out hay. And someone stole it They were seen leaving around 10- 1015 they ran through our fences and took off.
Pictures to come soon.

07/26/2026

This Historic County is changing. History doesn't matter to realtors or developers wanting to make a buck. Even members of the County Commissioners who moved in and got elected don't care. Even the land owner who has leased Burleson Crossing businesses for 99 years, despite her father being Judge and prohibited her from selling the land, hasn't stopped it.
For those of us who drove Austin in early years, seeing the changes, seeing what it is today, we see what's happening here and can't stop it. Can't we at least preserve some of the history before it's paved over?

07/26/2026

Researching your family tree isn't for the faint of heart. LOL.
Just saw a story of a girl saying after an Ancestry DNA test, her grandfather turned out to be Manson. That means her father, despite her having the same last name being Manson and never connecting the dots, never told her her family history. So she changes her last name because of that one man.
Are all Manson people psychopaths? I think not. If so, changing your last name won't change that.
So, we do carry traits of our ancestors, good and bad. It's what we do now that matters? Right?

07/25/2026

The Smithville Area Chamber of Commerce is compromised. They let anyone in, including the company that want to build data centers in our Historic County. Wonder who's the members of this Commerce? Wonder why this company chose Smithville? Guess it's things to come....

07/25/2026

Went to Chili's tonight for Margareta Day. Got into a conversation with someone from Giddings. And of course my conversations go to genealogy. They were from the Wends of Texas. I came home and whipped out my book the Wends of Texas. What he said is in the book. He knew his history. I'm so looking forward to going there the last weekend of September to get real German Food and atmosphere. Of course they were Lutherans, and Catholics of our County didn't like them. Case in point: My great grandmother was born in Rockne, was a devout Catholic, went to the Sacred Heart school, worked in the school. When she married a Lutheran she was kicked out of the Rockne Catholic Church.

07/25/2026

So you know your ancestor was born in Bastrop County and you have a subscription to Ancestry. You search and find they aren't there. Same with me trying to find my dad's birth certificate. I happened to spend all my vacations at the Bastrop County Courthouse, taking pictures of all the indexes, the Birth Index included. I looked at my picture of the Birth Index and he's on there but not on Ancestry.

So I'm typing up the Bastrop County Birth Index from early to 1951. 75 years are no longer protected. Here's what I noticed:

Between Ancestry's list of Bastrop County Birth Certificates and the Bastrop County Birth Index for Birth Certificates, there are hardly any two the same. WHY? WHY?

Some surnames have their own pages. Some were migrants that had a lot of children so they came between 1900 to 1930 then there is no more as they moved on.

The Index has births going back to the mid 1800's, which is great. Ancestry does not have them.

The Index is in cursive. Glad I learned it in school. Some letters are still hard to figure out, like i and e or a or s.

I've wanted to write a book with all my knowledge and research over the decades. I'm starting here. With the amount of time it's taking I may do as the Birth Volumes are, starting with Volume A to D. Then doing the other 3 Volumes.

Can you imagine being a genealogist in the future and hasn't been taught cursive?

06/13/2026

Lets talk Screw Worms.
There are very few of our seniors who were alive to tell of the 1930s infestation and the actions taken to defend against them. Many from the 1960s are gone but their kids remember their dads fighting these worms that went after their cattle. Now, in those days, farming crops was the prime money maker, not cattle, but they did all keep a milk cow, goats, pigs and fowl. It still cost them as a whole millions in losses. In our Bastrop County (BC), crops were replaced by cattle between 1950's and 1970's as well as going from no fencing to fencing. Today little crops are grown and cattle is the prime agriculture money maker, with hay production to feed them.
The government having no money in 1930s, put efforts in the North and Florida, stating there wasn't enough money to make a line of defense on the southern border so let it happen. Every year after that in BC in July, they reminded people it was the season, so spray for the Cow tick that made a hole and the worm could get in it. The drug companies in BC even made sprays to sell based on the governments recommendations.
In the 1960s the cattlemen and the sportsmen got together to try and eradicate this worm. Even the banks in Bastrop donated funds for those not able to afford the DDT products to spray their livestock. The government introduced sterile male flies, the only thing that really worked. It relied on cattlemen sending in flies and if it was the screw worm fly, the next day a plane would put out sterile male flies in the area. It worked.
The screw worm isn't new to this area. How it's handled is. We've known for over a year that it was coming. And here it is surprising many. Here's what history said:
The screw worm fly and it's damage has been known to ranchmen and farmers since 1843.
Elgin Courier 1936
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1536353/?q=%22screw%20worm%22
Elgin Courier 1936
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1536359/m1/5/?q=%22screw+worm%22
Bastrop Advertiser 1963
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth237935/m1/1/?q=%22screw+worm%22
1962 Smithville Advertiser
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1193812/m1/2/?q=%22screw+worm%22
There's many more historical articles about this in area newspapers so go to
https://texashistory.unt.edu/search/?q=%22screw+worm%22&t=fulltext&sort=
Put in your county, then you can select the decades and read the articles, the efforts, what works and doesn't and the tremendous efforts by the cattlemen and sportsmen to stop it.
What are your memories of your relatives efforts to stop it in the past?