A painting of General Sam Houston on horseback pointing toward the San Jacinto battleground

Veteran Bios

Stories of Valor

SEARCH NEARLY 1,300 BIOGRAPHIES of soldiers from both sides of the conflict, including the combatants at San Jacinto and the baggage train detachment at Harrisburg. Their stories help us better understand what it took to win Texas’s Independence. 

We Want Your Stories

Know something we don’t? It’s always exciting to find new information about the veterans of San Jacinto. Please fill out the form below, describing the information and its source. We will contact you about adding the information to our database.

Submit a Veteran

 

View by:

The Kemp Biographical Sketches

THESE BIOLOGICAL SKETCHES are the product of a life-long devotion to Texas history by Louis Wiltz Kemp. In compiling them, he referenced many sources, including bounty and donation land grant 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 Battleground 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 included 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.

*Disclaimer

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 and Battlefield Association.

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 has been included in the veteran biographies. A second set of these sketches is in the Kemp Papers at the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.