Dear Cousins, When I first started getting American Crossroads together, said to Cousin Michael that I thought the Quakers were the key to finding our roots. Although most of our families are far beyond those Quaker roots and traditions, the Quakers remain the key because they were at the heart of the kinship and community. Even the families who were not Quakers in the 1700's still had invisible ties to the Quaker localities and families through that kinship. The Quakers were at the forefront of migrations south, so if you have Appalachian or Southern backcountry ancestry you will benefit by looking at the Quaker information I've been putting up today. Tying it together is another thing entirely! The reason is that many Quakers left the south due to their opposition to slavery. Because of that firm stand, and other inflexible attitudes toward marriage out of unity, many people were either disowned or left their association with the Friends. A new page for study of the Spartanburg SC 1790 census has been uploaded. http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~amxroads I utilized ancestry.com's census images, and compared them with the indexed listings for that census. The results were amazing. I believe I found four or five "missing" Penningtons. The reason is that the census has been transcribed so very many times. Sometimes the original census was a transcription as the enumerators tried to alphabetize the census. Those census listings which were unaffected by this kind of indexing are better in another way in that they reveal the sequence of visits as the enumerator encountered the people to list them. This lets us know who lived near who. The alphabetized lists had to be transcribed from an original so spelling got messed up and names mixed up. Data undoubtedly was mixed up as well. Spartanburg was apparently not alphabetized, so this makes it valuable if we can determine from the mangled spelling who is really who. I have only worked on the Pennington surname with these images. I hope others will undertake to make the same comparisons with other surnames in our Perimeters. I am also analyzing the SW North Carolina 1790 census images for Rowan, Ashe, Guilford, Anson, Randolph and Montgomery counties. Some of these are loaded, and I will give you the locations as soon as I weed through them. I loaded the Quakers and Meetings page for Guilford county: http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~amxroads/NWSWquak/index.html At the end of this page is a summary of just a few of the surnames that I've been working on. Their names are all linked to both the Philadelphia Perimeter and these Southern localities. As we move forward these links will become increasing clear, and if you start following these same kinds of leads you will find your families. Please let me know about any connected surnames you're interested in and we will include them in future pages, or add them to ones already up. Love, Your Cousin, Carolyn Carolyn McDaniel cmacdee@teleport.com --- Visit American Crossroads --- http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~amxroads Carolyn McDaniel cmacdee@teleport.com ========================================= To send a message to the American Crossroads List: AMXROADS-L@rootsweb.com --- Visit American Crossroads --- http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~amxroads