The Kemp Sketches

These biographical sketches are the product of a life-long devotion to Texas history by Louis Wiltz Kemp. In compiling them, he referenced many sources, including boundary and donation certificates, comptrollers military service records, headright certificates, county deed and probate records, and oral compilations by descendants of veterans.

With assistance from the George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation, and from volunteers from the San Jacinto State Historic Site's Residential Volunteer program, we are pleased to make the Kemp Sketches for the veterans present at the Battle of San Jacinto available online. They are reproduced here to make valuable information in the Museum's collection available to researchers in an accessible format.

Kemp organized his biographical sketches into two groups: those who actually fought in the Battle of San Jacinto, and those who were with the baggage and the sick camped at Harrisburg.

Please note that typographical and factual errors have not been corrected from the original sketches.  Also, they have been scanned from the original manuscripts, a process that sometimes allows for mistakes in the new text. Researchers should verify the veracity of the texts' contents through other sources before quoting in publications.

The views presented therein do not necessarily reflect those of the San Jacinto Museum of History.

Since Kemp's death, supplemental research has found that a small number of additional names belong on the list of veterans; information on these veterans will be added in the future. A second set of these sketches is in the Kemp Papers at the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.