Dear Maineac Cousin, and Cousins on the List! I have some answers but not all on those questions and comments. The principal answer to Pennington questions lies in the fact that: (a) Not bragging(!!) I know more Pennington genealogical answers than the Pennington Organization that gets paid to have (at least) some answers and does (in fact) not. (b) Many of the people asking the questions have bet on the wrong horse. They need to watch the dark horse, comming up fast on the inside! The 1799 Wheler and William of Monroe County VA, now WVA, are our Cousin Ric Blake's ancestors, and are well documented after that time by Ric and the group of interested searchers he formed. Ric and Cousin Sybil Hampton wrote a book on these descendants. We know they came from Cecil County Maryland. We know because of the names they are most likely descendants of Otho and William, Richard Pennington and Mary Wheeler's orphans, under the guardianship of Otho Othoson. Otho Othoson calls them his grandsons. This is also the most likely Pennington line for my own problem Pennington/Pembertons of Baltimore county, for after my ancestor John Pennington and a putative brother Jesse served in the War of 1812 from Baltimore County, he and Jesse along with several other putative siblings: Richard, William, and Allen can all be found huddled together in where Belmont, Guernsey, and Harrison counties come together in Ohio. Like Sybil and Ric's Wheeler and William, the Cecil links to these Penningtons are both tantalizingly clear in the names, but the supporting data is missing to tie them to a specific Cecil County ancestor. I have a few ideas why and where, but e-mail is too difficult to try and explain. Helping Ric solve this puzzle this year is my primary research goal for 2002. The Richard who married Hannah Boone is not well documented at all, as Debbie suggests, as she seeks to find antecedents for her Richard, of Pendleton county. In actuality, I don't know of any information about him until after he married Hannah Boone. He drops out of the sky into North Carolina along the shallow ford of the Yadkin river. Most give him a birthplace of Pennsylvania, but I don't think so. I think he is also of Cecil county. Again, the research needed to show where both these Richards really came from has not been done, and is not being facilitated by the ones with the bucks to do it. Naming is not always by pattern, but in colonial times, names usually do keep reappearing in families in consistent ways. After 1800, this seems to change somewhat, as families were more on the move, and were beginning to use middle names with more frequency. But even then, I find names are still used in ways that reflect the particular family's connection to their roots. In almost all of the cases where names are used in mysterious or inconsistent ways, I find that it is because the identity has been misinterpreted or distorted in some way. In the backcountry people the influence of Dutch, Swede/Finns, and Welsh patronymics drastically changes both contemporary spellings and English type name patterns. In modern times, the indexers and interpreters (researchers) tend to misread the ancient writing and mispellings. The only solution to these inherent problems (or at least a pathway to the solution) is to use a broader form of research, such as I suggest and employ! Following one name will not resolve the problem of identity. The researcher needs to become equally familiar with the kinship families who surround their target ancestor, and this will produce the additional clues needed. I am still pouring over all those Delaware and Swede/Finn books you loaned me, Iz! Today, in hot pursuit of my Strother/Smith ancestors, I found a census indexer had denoted John Strother as John Shother, living next door to John Smith in Henry County, KY on the 1850 census. THIS may be the family I need for my ancestor! I only found this by literally crawling over the census listings for Smiths in Henry County. My ancestor was born about 1855, so he should appear on the 1860 census, but again, I have not found a family either in Missouri or Kentucky that fits him precisely. I know he was born in Kentucky, but he lived in Missouri prior to coming to Oregon in time to fall in the path of the bloody Bannocks in 1878. More census crawling is needed! I am using ancestry's online images, which are great for poor backcountry researchers like me, stuck out in the boonies without a genealogy library or even a microfilm reader. Ancestry.com has some great databases, but recently with their addition of HTML coding for "comments" of each two or three line entry in many of the databases, it makes it nearby impossible to utilize their information properly. I take the information and save it in a temporary text file which then can be manipulated into my own databases for comparison and study in a spreadsheet. BUT, it is time consuming, and irritating that Ancestry.com is defeating the effective use of online data collections. I'll be putting up a study of the Strother/Smith identity results, which I hope might be a helpful format for others. Won't it be nice if I finally solve a 150 year old mystery with my methodology??? Maybe the same for the Richards and Abrahams Penningtons. Then on to the Atkeys!!!! The cats are fine, but whining about going outside now that it's getting warmer. They run around outside, rubbing and rolling in the dirt and on the warm brick walkway from the backdoor. Then they come back inside to use their kitty litter! Crazy things! We are about 85% moved into the front "Big" house, and the remaining 15% is strewn over two sheds, the rear "Little House," and the 100 feet between all. This strewing is due to having injected genealogy mania into the midst of moving mania. If it's nice tomorrow I'm forgetting the townie stuff and heading to the mountains for my first cabin visit, which I plan to start rebuilding this year. Just around the bend, the Great Green Celtic invasion, local version, and much Great Green Diversion of primary purpose. Love, your Manic Mountain Momma Cousin, Carolyn Carolyn McDaniel cmacdee@centurytel.net ========================================= --- Visit American Crossroads --- http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~amxroads --- Visit Backcountry Crossroads --- http://www.backcountrycrossroads.com