Attempts to record the history of Oxford County were few and far between during the first century of European settlement and growth. Thomas S. Shenston (1822–1895), the Oxford County commissioner for the provincial census of 1851, authored "The Oxford gazetteer; containing a complete history of the county of Oxford, from its first settlement..." in 1852, but in footnotes to several portions of the text he indicates that the historical narrative he had compiled was forced out of the book by the amount of census data tabulated in its pages. Despite its shortcomings, the book was reprinted by the county as a Canada Centennial project in 1967. When the mania for illustrated county atlases swept across Ontario in the 1870s, Oxford was included, but the volume published by Walker and Miles of Toronto in 1876 devoted only five pages to a summary of the county's history. Oxford was not included in the mania which created county history volumes in the 1880s and 1890s, but the Oxford Historical and Museum Society was established in 1897, and a great leap forward took place in 1948 when it partnered with the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Western Ontario to create the first of what the Ontario government planned as a network of county museums to aid local schools in teaching students about their history. Since then, the Oxford Historical Society has published a series of booklets as history bulletins and a quarterly newsletter, and also ensures that more recent books by local historians are kept in print and available for purchase.