My most interesting ancestor is my great-grandmother, Lucy Ann SIMONS (although her name may have been SIMMONS, SYMONS, or SYMONDS -- I just know it was pronounced like Simmons, but was probably not spelled that way). Her primary fascination for me is that I have been able to find out so little about her. Her mother, Nancy Emaline HARRISON, and her father, Samuel Darby SIMONS (or whatever), were married in Tipton Co. TN in July 1845. Lucy was born near Waco, TX in March 1847. Her mother died when she was very small. Her father (according to family legend, and you all know how undependable those can be) went "to Mexico" to look for gold, went on to California, and never returned to Texas. Before he left, he took Lucy Ann about 125 miles to Independence, TX and left her there with two sisters named Lydia and Margaret Hood, who operated the Hood Hotel. Lucy Ann was raised by the Hood sisters, attended what was then Baylor Academy in Independence, and when she married Alexander Bradford HUNT in 1866, her marriage license was issued in the name of Lucy HOOD. >From legal papers dealing with the estate of Lydia HOOD, Lucy does not seem to have been a blood relative of the Hood sisters, and one of my lingering questions is, "Why did her father leave her with them?" I would like to find some link between the families; I hate to think her father would just have abandoned that baby to the first two kindly spinsters he ran across. Lydia and Margaret HOOD were daughters of Robert Hood Jr., whose family left NC for TN shortly after 1830. Some members of the family were in Tipton Co. TN (where Lucy and Sam married) in the 1840s/1850s. Lucy's mother was a HARRISON; the HARRISONS and HOODS in NC intermarried frequently. So far, however, I have not been able to find the connection between Lucy and the HOODS. Lucy's first husband died in a fever epidemic in 1867; in 1876 she married my g-grandfather, Henry Edwin VICKERS, and they moved to Bell Co. TX. She named her only daughter, my grandmother, Lydia; Lydia, in turn, named a daughter Margaret and another daughter Lydia, obviously for the HOOD sisters. I'd love to know something more about "Grandma Vickers," as my father always called her, and about her parents and their brief marriage. Not fascinating to others, perhaps, but a real puzzle ot me. Nancy Davis Harwood Houston, TX