Winter Lecture Series 2025 – Janie Collier White: Danish Watermen of the Texas Coastal Bend

Join us at the Texas Maritime Museum for our annual Winter Lecture Series every Monday from 12:00-1:00 p.m. This free program is one of our most popular adult programs and offers twelve weeks of engaging and informative presentations by distinguished professionals in their respective fields. Complimentary light refreshments will be available.

This week, Janie Collier White will speak on the topic of Danish Watermen of the Texas Coastal Bend.

Janie Collier White lived in the John Sorenson home at the north end of South Water Street in Rockport until she was 10. Her mother, grandparents, and other family members loved to talk about history. Her mother’s parents were John C. Sorenson & Lola Lee Herring Sorenson. Janie’s great-grandparents were Simon B. Sorenson & Josephine Paul Sorenson, and John C. Herring & Laura Olivia Clark Herring. The Sorensons discussed it, and Herrings arrived in what was then Refugio County shortly after the end of the Civil War.

When Janie was ten years old, Judy Sorenson Collier, with her daughters Judith Lee and Janie, moved to Galveston to join their husband and father, Albert Walker Collier. He was a marine biologist and at that was with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Galveston. Janie graduated from high school in Galveston. After graduation, she moved to Austin to attend the University of Texas. She married Thomas H. White and had two children. She has a BS in Interior Design from the University of Texas School of Architecture. She worked at the White Family electronics manufacturing business, White Instruments, Inc., until the family sold that business. After that, she was Chief Financial Officer and part owner of Majec Systems, Inc., a computer programming business until she retired and moved back to Rockport in 2004.

In the early 1990s, she restored her Rockport family’s late 19th and early 20th-century photographs. Once she came home to Rockport in 2004, she became active in the Aransas County Historical Society. She has served that organization as Vice-President, President, and Treasurer. She remains active and is currently on the Board of Trustees. When the ACHS Board decided to produce an annual calendar of historic photographs, she designed the calendar and restored the pictures for the first one. She created the calendars from 2007 to 2022.

After she and her husband retired to Rockport, they moved into the house on Water Street that Janie’s Grandparents, John C., and Lola Herring Sorenson, built-in 1910. She still lives there today, working with photographs and researching the fascinating history of Aransas County.