This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Phillips, Clark, Wilber, Wells, Brown, Clark, Noblitt, Whinery, Evans, Tate Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/5U.2ADI/97.237.1.1.1 Message Board Post: Hi Debbie Yes, Charles E. Phillips was my grand-uncle. His brother John Elmer Phillips was my paternal grandfather. I think your question about me knowing them is referring to whether I knew them personally? As opposed to just knowing the names that go where on the family tree? Is that correct? I don't remember ever meeting your grandfather Charles. I think by the time I was born (1954) he had already gone to California. I do remember when I was a very young girl that we went on vacation one year to visit relatives in California, but I honestly can't remember the names of who we visited. Of Charles and his siblings: My grand-aunt Bertha Myrtle Phillips Evans continued living in Gravette until she died, and her family for the most part stayed in Gravette also. Aunt Bertha had the best house to visit when you're a kid. She had a big house that sat on property that had a deep slope in the back. You'd enter her house at street level, then as a kid we'd head straight out the back porch, which was up on a kind of stilt-column support type of thing. It was supported because just under the back porch, the ground sloped way down and stretched back into a big backyard that had lots of trees to climb. That backyard was endless fascination for my siblings and I and my cousins. Lots to do and play with, and Aunt Bertha always had a ready glass of lemonade for us, to go with the cookies. I remember her very fondly. I knew Bertha's daughter Corene fairly well, within the context of a 1st cousin once removed. Corene, along with her husband Howard Reynolds and thei! r children lived next door to all of us for a long time. (When I say next door, I mean next to my family, and my grandparents John and Lena -- all three of our families lived next to each other, about a mile from Aunt Bertha's own home) I used to play with Corene's daughter Donella. I knew their brothers Perry and Lester (my grand-uncles), but not well at all. It was more of just an acknowledgement of who they were when I happen to be at grandpa John's house if they came to visit him. I knew they were grandpa's brothers, but not much else. It was the same with their brother Alvin and youngest sister Winnie. I met them when they came home to Gravette for a visit. But both of them had moved with their respective families to other states, so I rarely saw them. As for my grandfather -- John Emory Phillips (older brother to your grandfather Charles), yes I knew him and his wife, my grandma Lena, very well. I often lived with them for extended periods of time between the ages of 4-13. In fact, I was living temporarily with my grandmother Lena at the time of her death. Lena and John had divorced about a year before her death in 1967, and John had remarried and moved to Siloam Springs. The circumstances around the divorce were quite the local scandal at the time! Grandma Lena still lived all alone in the house she had shared with Grandpa. So I was living with her for a short time, and when I was 12, I'm the one who found Grandma slumped over unconscious over the breakfast table one morning. I couldn't rouse her, so I ran next door to Corene's house and got her to come back with me and try to help grandma Lena. Corene had to call an ambulance, and they took grandma away and she died shortly after that. I never got to see her ag! ain, so that's always been my last memory of grandma. John and Lena had 3 children. The oldest, Marvin, died in 1949 at the age of 23. When he died, he was a soldier, and his death was somehow related to his being in the army, but I don't know what the details were. I'm trying to find out now, but as I grew up, it was but one of the mysteries of our family that was whispered about, but not spoken of except rare occasions. They had a daughter, Juanita Maxine, who also died while she was serving in the US Marines, she was a W.A.C. She died in 1954, a month after I was born, at the age of 24. I don't know the details of her death, either... another hushed topic in the family. I seem to remember hearing that she died in New York City while still a W.A.C., in a fire in a hotel she was staying at. But that's an old, old memory that I haven't been able to verify. She died with no children. That left my father Robert Allen as John and Lena's only surviving child. I had 2 brothers and 1 sister. My sister died at the age of 9 from leukemia, leaving me the oldest child. If you would like to know more information about any of this, or know more about any of these people from personal memories, please feel free to email me at [email protected] Of the siblings including your grandfather Charles and my grandfather John, and their sister Bertha, John's line turned out to be filled with tragedy and unhappiness. Bertha's line grew, and included a son who became a minister, and that branch of the family (the Evans branch) became quite large, and a happy family as far as I know. Feel free also to explore the information I have on our Phillips line. Just click around from the front page at: http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/g/o/p/Dawn-Gopalan/index.html . I have the earliest Phillips from 1710, and am still working on the line. I would also love to include any information you would care to share on the Charles Phillips line, as I have no information on him at all, other than a few census entries and DOB. And nice to meet a cousin :) Dawn