I am proudly, obnoxiously, incurably Texan. I know this about myself and I’ve made peace with it.
We recently shot a project in Austin, and it reminded me of something I love about this work: every once in a while, a family sits down in front of my camera and connects me to a version of Texas history I didn’t know existed. This was one of those times.
Most of us know the broad strokes. The Alamo. San Jacinto. Stephen F. Austin. Sam Houston. The revolution. We learned it in school, we drove past the monuments, we memorized what we had to. But some families didn’t move on. Some families have been here since before it was a state, since before it was a republic, since it was just a wild, contested piece of land where crazy people showed up with rifles and opinions.
This family was one of those.
Their roots went back to the revolution and further. Generations deep. The kind of history where you pull one thread and suddenly you’re in the 1830s watching alliances form between settlers and Native American groups that I, a guy with no history degree but a fondness for Texas lore, had never heard of.
Here’s what got me. We always hear the same version of the story. The settlers came, the Native Americans resisted, and it was brutal on both sides. That’s not wrong. But it’s incomplete. Because there were Native Americans who looked at these sunburned Texans and thought, these lunatics might be onto something. They sided with the settlers. They fought alongside them. They believed in whatever strange vision was taking shape out here.
I had no idea these people existed.
That’s the thing about this job. I’m a Texan who thought he knew Texas, and a family in Austin taught me that I’d barely scratched the surface. Their story isn’t in the textbooks I read. It’s not on the monuments I drove past. It’s in their family, passed down through generations, waiting for someone to sit down and listen.
I was that someone. And I sat there with my jaw on the floor.
Susan, the woman behind this project, wanted her family’s connection to this deep history preserved. Not for the public. Not for a museum. For the people coming next. The grandkids who’ll grow up in a Texas that looks nothing like the one their ancestors carved out of the wilderness. They deserve to know where they came from.
I’ve filmed in a lot of states. I’ll film in a lot more. But there’s something about filming Texas families that hits different. Maybe it’s because I’m one of them. Maybe it’s because this state has a way of making you feel like you’re part of something larger, even when you’re just sitting in a living room with a camera.
Either way, I left Austin feeling like I’d just taken a graduate seminar I didn’t know I needed.