Hello again, I mentioned Duff earlier and there's been a couple of comments, questions, etc. The Duff that features so much in Southern Illinois' Revolutionary War history, as well as the history of the outlaws of Cave-in-Rock is John Duff, also known as John McDuff, John McElduff, and (by the French) Jean Michael Duff. He married Leticia/Letty/Cedy Smith, daughter of Henry Smith. By the early 1780s, both are found in the Kaskaskia area. The Southern Illinois Duff was born in the Carolinas about 1760, possibly late 1759. He often appears in the Kaskaskia records with a Daniel Duff/McDuff/McElduff. There are a pair of brothers in South Carolina by the names of Daniel and John McElduff who inherited part of their grandfather's estate in the 1780s that could be the same pair. I'm waiting from a response to a researcher following that line to see if we have a match. Based on e-mails from another Duff researcher a few years ago, the Duffs someone mentioned in their posting today who are found! in western Kentucky in the 1820s are a different family. I brought up Duff as an example of why more research is needed. The slave catcher I referred to last night is William C. Blakely. Last year a little old lady called Mr. Sisk and told him she had been meaning to call for about three years. She had heard stories about her ancestor that he was a slave catcher, lived in either southern Gallatin or northeastern Hardin counties, and had worked with Crenshaw. I called her the next night. As a sidebar she mentioned that people would borrow money from this ancestor. He would always tell them to come back the next day. After they would leave, he would get in his skiff or canoe and go either up or downriver. The next day he would have the money. When she told me the story, bells went off in my head. The idea of a secret stash out in the woods is a well-known part of Hardin County folklore. No one trusted banks and apparently no one wanted to keep the money in their cabin where it could be found or burned down, so they stashed it in some cave or down some hole. Duff is just one of the people associated with these secret stashes. We also know from the History of Union County, Kentucky, which is just across the river to the east from Gallatin and Hardin counties, that Duff lived at what's now Caseyville, and at one point had three men working with him. By 1886, the local people could only remember the names Blakely, Hall and Hazle. Well, Halls are practically as common as Smiths in western Kentucky, even in 1799, the year the story of the accomplices probably dates. It's also the year a newspaper reports Duff's death. There are Hazles/Hazels downriver at Smithland, Ky., in 1797 and across the river into Pope County by ! the first decade of the 1800s. There's also a John Blakely in what is now Union County at least as early as 1803. He's the father of William, and he settled right across the river from Duff's home in Caseyville at Battery Rock. To be honest, I have not found any paperwork that shows William Blakely as a slave catcher. However, if that's a story that's been passed down by family members, particularly if it comes from someone who may have heard it from a person who knew William, then I'm inclined to believe it. Trust me, being a slave catcher is not something positive that people list on applications to the D.A.R. That's the type of story that families typically want to forget, and often do quite easily enough. But if that's not enough to start connecting the dots, there are even better connections between William and outlaws. While I can't connect William to Crenshaw other than locality, William's connections to the outlaw leader James Ford of Ford Ferry's fame, nearly jumped off the page. William's brother Peleg is mentioned in the will of one of Ford's sons. Apparently, as a teen Peleg was living in the younger Ford's household. The one thing the family remembers about Peleg according to the History of the Travis Family, is that he was a good card player. Now there's a trait you might pick up living with a river pirate and highwayman. Then, after communicating with three other Blakely and Womack researchers we discovered something interesting about William's second or third wife. She was the mistress of the other Ford son and named as the mother of one of his kids in his will. William even named a son by that wife after a member of the Ford family. I usually go about connecting the dots by digging out various tidbits of information from court documents, newspapers, family Bibles, e-mails from other researchers, old books, you name it. I then put everything in chronological order. Crenshaw's financial ups and downs really show up this way when you compare the land purchases with the mortgages then later with the court judgments against him. Another way is to literally map out the information. Find a group of landowners, look at their names, then start comparing those names to marriage records and probate papers. It's no surprise that young men and women usually married neighboring young men and women. It's not uncommon to find siblings marrying siblings. (Although I admit it does make for interesting family trees when you find three sisters marrying a father and two sons, as happens in my ancestry - it was the father's second wife). Just as I have not written the final word on Crenshaw as the research is still ongoing, I haven't written the final word on Duff. No one has. I may know where there are some documents that mention him that I still need to hit, but that doesn't stop someone from running across something in another pile of documents somewhere. Just as we haven't found all of our Crenshaw information in just Gallatin County, we have to look in other counties and states as well. I don't know if it was on this list or not, but recently a poster noted how one of his ancestors jumped back and forth from the Louisville, Kentucky, area to Natchez, Mississippi. He doubted the evidence he saw because he didn't think they would have moved around that much. Amazingly, they did move around that much -- at least the men. A family might raise a crop of potatoes in Kentucky or Illinois, build a flatboat and the men would float down to Natchez or all the way to New Orleans. And they would do this every year. Richer planters might own farms spread out across multiple state. O. C. Vanlandingham, an early Shawneetown businessman had plantations in central Kentucky as well as Louisiana at the same time he maintained an office in Gallatin County. Equality grocery store owner Thomas H. Leavell (one of my great-something uncles) not only owned the store in Equality during the 1830s, but is also found in Natchez and paying taxes on a slave in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, which is right across the river from Natchez. I've also found someone with the same name down in Louisiana in the 1820s that's probably him as well. John Hart Crenshaw's 1905 biography states he owned 30,000 acres. We can't prove that yet. We've found around 11,000 acres in Gallatin and surrounding counties and another 4,000 acres north of Memphis, Tennessee. The other 15,000 acres may exist, just in some state or county we haven't looked at yet. Our ancestors moved around -- a lot. My grandmother may not have moved to live outside a 10-mile radius in her lifetime, but her ancestors were a different story. My point all along has been we need to keep an open mind when we do historical research or simply climb our family tree looking for interesting nuts. Our forefathers and mothers were people just like us. They possessed all the human frailties, wants and desires as we do. What they did 150 years ago doesn't reflect on us so much as simply add to the foundation of who we are. How we build on that foundation is our own responsibility. Sincerely, Jon Musgrave www.IllinoisHistory.com