I hope Susan won't mind if I share this wonderful story with the rest of you through the Mailing List. Is anyone else working on the same Tate family she is? Can all the rest of you almost "feel" her excitement when she found that tombstone, same as I did? Delaine Date: Wed, 18 Mar 1998 11:48:26 -0600 From: susan jackson <jacksons@cswnet.com> To: delaine@ipa.net Subject: TATES Delaine, I subscribed to the Scott Co. site a couple of months ago and I've written a couple of people about the TATES. It's funny, I never knew just how many different lineages of TATES there were until I started trying to find someone of the same lineage. I even found the same exact name from the same area THOMAS JEFFERSON TATE - different line though. I have quite a bit of info on my TATES from good record keeping, but mostly because of a book my grandfather bought in the 70's, "Tates and Allied Families of the South" by Ethel Updike. Also, Wanda Gray (a distant cousin of my mother) also has stuff I would like to sit down and compare with. We knew my gr-gr grandfather THOS. J. TATE had been married twice and we knew the name of the second wife. My aunt, Ann Hunt (you may know her?), who still lives in Waldron, found an article Wanda had put in the paper about SIDDIE DURLEY, the first wife of THOS. J. TATE. We were in shock! A piece of our puzzle fell in our laps! So I know Wanda probably has other info I'd love to see. My grandfather, Johnny TATE, still lives in Waldron also. His health is not good and I've made this a hobby trying to find things out for him while he's still here. Another discovery I stumbled onto was a miracle in itself. In my TATE book it mentioned an ancestor, my daughters' gr-gr-gr-gr-gr-grandmother (8 generations back!!) died while visiting a dau. in Belleville, AR. and was buried there. 1..Rev. William MEERS ***m.Frances Murphy MEERS 2..Dina Ann MEERS m.James Madison TATE 3..Thomas Jefferson TATE m1.Siddie DURLEY m2.F.A. MACKEY 4..Earnest Lee TATE m. Georgia Mae BAGWELL 5..Johnny Lee TATE m. Foye Juanita RHYNE 6..Johnnie Sue TATE m. Charles Ray BROWN 7..Susan Annette BROWN m. Ronald D. JACKSON 8..Kristen M. JACKSON 8..Rachel E. JACKSON Well, I live near Belleville. NO ONE had noticed this in the book before and it's been in the family 20+ years! It said she [Frances Murhpy MEERS] was buried in Lower Falls Cemetery. I started calling around because I didn't grow up here. We moved here in '81. I'd never heard of the cemetery, so I called historians, Catherine Rogers, and old people, even a 98 year old black woman that was born here. NO ONE had heard of the cemetery. I was about to give up hope and one day my husband and I were talking about a cemetery he knew of on his work route named "Lower Spring Creek Cemetery" To hurry the story along, we went to this cemetery not expecting to find anything, and we thought if we did, since she had died in the early 1800's the headstones were totally eroded and mostly broken from that era, so we didn't figure we'd know if we did find it. I was out in the middle of the cemetery and my husband was along the edge and I screamed!! There it was, plain as day, "FRANCES MURPHY MEERS", with a brand new headstone. NO ONE in my family knows who put the headstone there. We didn't even know it existed until I found it, really by accident. Someone else would've had to made the same discovery I made, being the wrong cemetery name and all. We'll never know I guess. What a miracle! The most important thing I learned from this is ALWAYS GO ON YOUR HUNCHES when researching family history. It just my pay off like it did for me! My grandfather, Johnny TATE, was SO excited about my find!!! Keep on surfin' and searchin', Susan Jackson :)