Dear Cousins on the List: Happy Thanksgiving! I am going "home" to Eastern Oregon for Thanksgiving, and I am thankful that I have wrangled an invitation from some very dear old friends there, and will see my mother, and some of my other relatives -- my Aunt who had a stroke in the summer. Things are coming together in my mind on several deceptive families that have puzzled me for some time. Now I need to get my thoughts on paper and the supporting information up on the website. One family is the Beals/Bells, etc., which was allied in several ways with the Penningtons. This family makes a good study on how misidentifying someone in the line puts the research completely off track for many years. In April I wrote that there were two groups of Bealls, and now the research indicates that the part of the family linked to Penningtons was the Quaker bunch. It is quite clear once the family is researched, not just copied from one genealogy file to another. The others are the Baker and Williams families. Isn't it interesting that Marilyn was finding Elias Baker information at the same time I was! My great-grandfather, William Marion Pennington, b. 1852 in Ohio, was orphaned and raised by relatives. It appears that the relatives were Samuel and Rachel Baker. I believe Rachel was daughter of "1812 John Pennington" who was my William's grandfather. William's father was Marian Loveless or Lovelace Pennington, and likely brother of Rachel Baker. In the 1870's and 1880's these families were in Johnson County, Iowa and Frontier County, Nebraska, where Samuel Baker, b. 1803 is buried. I haven't found Rachel's place of death or burial. William Marion's mother is Emily Williams, b. WVA. I haven't identified her family, but it seems likely that she came from some of these other Williams who were linked over years to the Penningtons. There were two Williams families -- Paul and George --in the Hopewell and Sherranco settlements in Orange (later Frederick Co) Virginia, along with Abraham and Isaac. Richard Williams was a Quaker in the same area, and later is in the NW NC perimeter where so many Penningtons, Bakers, Beesons, Bealls, Bartons, Bransons, Hollingsworths, etc., are once again found. My Thanksgiving present to all NW NC Perimeter searchers: The chatty, informative, RICH History of Watauga County. It's a jewel! Mary, this has great Coffey information! http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Estates/8473/Arthur/contents.html Love, Your Cousin, Carolyn Carolyn McDaniel cmacdee@teleport.com ========================================= --- Visit American Crossroads --- http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~amxroads

Greetings, Carolyn -- I don't belong in the Pennington group,but found it of interest that you're "digging" amidst Bakers and Williams. So am I, but mine are in Bradford Co., PA (north central PA on the NY border). The names are too common to research easily when the one you start with is the first one of the family in the county. Nevertheless, hunting is fun, and full of surprises! Mary C. Yarnell