Episode notes
What this transmission is actually about
The episode begins with Daniel Perry III, Clayton’s fifth-great-grandfather, who entered Mexican Texas in the 1830s, served in the Texian Army and later held positions of local civic trust in Fort Bend County. His biography offers the familiar architecture of a Texas founding story: migration, battle, land and institution building.
The complete record is more demanding. The Perry network’s power also depended on enslaved labor and on laws that treated people as collateral, inheritance and property. The episode places public memory beside the documentary record instead of asking either one to disappear.
This is research for The Arms of God: Los Brazos de Dios, Clayton’s developing family history: an attempt to understand not only who the family remembers, but who the surviving records were designed to forget.