Every holiday season I thank someone for a great gift to Texas. This time I’d like to thank Jac Darsnek, the much-loved creator and editor of the Traces of Texas Facebook page that has accrued more than 1 million followers since 2010.
Texas has always been more than a place. It’s a memory, a voice, a photograph tucked into a drawer, a story shared across a kitchen table.
Darsnek didn’t start out with a plan but simply an instinct, sharpened by experience, that Texans liked talking about Texas. By late 2012, something clicked. Not because of flashy trends or algorithms but because Darsnek leaned into history and let it speak for itself.
His breakthrough moment was publishing a black-and-white photo of the original Whataburger in Corpus Christi, which went viral.
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Photographs became the heartbeat. The images, most of them taken long before color film was common, carry a gravity that modern photos often lack. These aren’t stylized shots posed to impress; they’re family photographs, photos of musicians before fame, pilots before they were legends, farmers before nostalgia softened the edges of real life. This was Texas unfiltered.
What’s remarkable is not just the photos—acquired from the Portal to Texas History, the University of Texas at Arlington’s Special Collections archive and other sources—but what happens after they’re posted. The comments section becomes a living classroom, a town square, a reunion hall.
After a photo taken at Dyess Air Force Base in the 1950s was posted, readers identified the exact model of the cash register, the type of flight suit the pilots wore, even the materials that would later replace them. Darsnek said Texas has an astonishing depth of collective knowledge and a generosity and passion for sharing it.
That generosity mirrors Darsnek’s own. Gratitude underpins Traces of Texas like cultural bedrock. Every contributor is thanked. Every artifact is treated as precious. Darsnek once shared that if someone takes time from their “one granted life” to send in a photo or a story, the least he can do is acknowledge it and thank them most sincerely. That attitude may be the secret ingredient.
Then there are the people. Centenarians. War veterans. Farmers. River guides. Storytellers like Mel Dart, who flew 35 missions over Europe in World War II and said he was “too dumb to be scared.” Or Dorothy McQuary Callaway, born on a farm near Thorndale. Darsnek walked the property with her when she was 99, and she showed him an old well, saying she had pumped “a kajillion gallons of water out of that thing.”
Sometimes, Traces of Texas reconnects people. Once, after the devastating 2013 explosion in West, a family photo was found and returned to its owners after being posted on the page.
Traces of Texas is a reminder that Texas is a community and that our stories and photographs are worth preserving, sharing and honoring. Traces of Texas is our shared digital archive. That is a wonderful gift. And Texas is better for it.
