This question has a couple parts (1)So basically my family owns a ranch on the red river and we found 3 (expensive looking for the time) grave stones dated from the 1880s-1890s buried on a nice hill overlooking where the river bank use to be. They were all under 35 2 females one child. How can I find out who these people are and how they died I'd like to know the truth my family has ideas?(discussed later) (2) We contacted the local tax office but they said all their records from that time period were lost in a fire. My grandpa has created some crazy ideas about how they died, he tells people it was probably Indian raiders coming across the red river and raiding one of the men who lived on the river and who was a buffalo hunter that went out hunting, leaving his family behind and while he was out the local tribes probably robbed and killed the women and children, while he was away, twice.(did this actually happen on the red river between 1880-1890? It sounds unlikely it would happen to the same guy twice) (3)We would also like ideas on how to properly preserve the area, the letters are fading from the tombstones and we want to do something to preserve the area in case they have any surviving family who would want to see it... so anything helps
Ty again yall I know it's a lot but we really do just wanna learn about and preserve these people's memories
Edit*pretty sure I used the wrong from of family's in the title please dont not answer because of it
Texas counties will typically have a Tax Assessor-Collector and a County Clerk. The Clerk keeps records of birth and death, amongst others. Their records may well have been co-located and both lost in the same fire, but you never know. If by "tax office" you didn't mean the County Clerk, you may want to check with them.
There are also census roles, immigration logs, and various other sorts of documents that can be used but are hard to track down. As mentioned elsewhere, genealogists often have these already in a processed and search-able form.
How can I find out who these people are and how they died....
A potentially productive route is through the services of an Historical Society that collects information pertinent to your area. Another is through genealogy. Are there any genealogists in your community. You have a name, a place and date of death, a genealogist can usually produce a lot from that data. Finally, I would search for early maps of the area via local or regional libraries or online services (are Government Land Office maps online?). I like early county plat maps, or early commercial maps (in the west we have what are called [Metsker maps] (http://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcollections/metsker-atlases)) and they can be helpful. Good Luck.