Hi The time period, the location and the NC origins place some of my people with yours. I have done a small amount of research on the name Davis because...... I have a Delia W. Davis who married James Allen. ALLEN is one of our family names, and I've done a LOT on ALLENS, without a lot of success. His wife is even more mysterious. Delia gave all kinds of ages to the enumerator, but in the end, her gravesite indicates she was born 1801, VA. James was born KY 1813--12 years her junior. They had 2 sons, John and William, b. 1832 and 1841. In 1860, 2 younger women are in the James Allen household--Clarissa Wood (age 34) and Eveline Hall (age 19). I researched to find that Clarissa DAVIS married Geo. Wood a few years earlier in Greene County. (Can't find my notation, but it's here somewhere.) The W. in Delia's name and the Davis in Clarissa's name are "interesting coincidences." All came from NC into this household. Why are they together? One year later, in 1861, Eveline Hall married James' younger son, William T. Allen. They lived in Macoupin County after this, near Apple Creek. They had 7 children, one of whom became my husband's paternal grandmother--Mary Elizabeth Allen Miller. Eveline Hall ALLEN died at her home in Macoupin County, May 1891. I have her small obituary from the Carlinville Democrat, and someone was kind enough to photograph her gravestone in Carlinville City Cemetery. But the County Clerk has no record of her death which could give clues to her parentage. Interestingly, in this same county, there was another family named Chipman. One of their daughters, Nancy, married Jacob Gordon Bacon and their eldest daughter became my husband's maternal grandmother. Nancy's sister Acenith, married Allen LOVELACE and moved to Texas. Her parents and younger sisters followed them to Bonham, Fannin County TX--apparently missing both the IL and TX censuses in 1850. Seth Chipman was sworn in as Justice of the Peace in Bonham in 1852. There are a LOT of NC Lovelaces in Fannin County TX in 1860-1870. I don't know if any of these people connect with yours, but there sure are a lot of "close encounters." I have been watching this list for months now, and your message was encouraging. I've spent a long time trying to find Eveline's people. There are a lot of Halls in the vicinity, too, but they're almost as hard as the Davis's and the Allens. If we could only know the reason this family had 2 women with different surnames living in their household at the time of the 1860 census. I will be interested to see if these similarities are fruitful. At this point I'm at "leave no stone unturned." Jan