Didnt someone have some Oxley research..wondering if this family sounds familiar at all..... also the Bell family or Houghton's...any help is appreciate, thank you kindly...Nena <<<We have two mysteries on my side of the family (probably more). There is a grandfather we do not know on the OXLEY side of the family. Jenkins OXLEY was a base-born son of Hannah OXLEY some time around the Revolutionary War. He is my ancestor. He may have been adopted by Everett OXLEY. Still checking on this. He inherited land, learned farming and turned out to be a stable member of the community. Secondly, my maternal grandmother had been told she was a Bell all of her life. She used the Bell name in school.When my mother was a teen, my ggrandmother wrote to grandma Grace and told her she was not a Bell. My mother found her weeping about this. Of course, nobody really cared at that time. Everybody else in the family was happy-go-lucky. The letter was put up on a shelf and forgotten. My ggrandmother in WV knew nothing about sex as a young girl and was taken advantage of and perhaps raped. This produced a daughter. Her parents tolerated that and tried to help raise the daughter. My ggrandmother then, fell madly in love with someone who had red hair and who worked on the railroads. Because she got pregnant, she was kicked out of her parents home with her first child and had to go to Indiana to have the baby. That baby was my grandmother, Grace. Later, my ggrandmother returned to WV and worked in a home to support herself. Her parents had kept back all of the letters this young man had written. My ggrandmother ended up meeting someone who was almost 20 years her senior. His wife had died and left children. They got married and had children together. It was a marriage of convenience. My ggrandmother called her husband, Mr. Bell. He was to be obeyed. Not too long after she was married, the railroad man came back to get her...but alas...it was too late...she was married. A romantic, but sad love story of missed connections. We have never found my ggrandfather, the railroad man with red hair. According to my aunt, the letter said, Wheatley was his name. A Bell half-cousin said she heard it was Houghton or Haughington. His first name was Otto. H anyone out there heard of a red headed Otto??? Oddly enough, my mother married a red-haired German, whose family rejected her because she was from WV and might be a hillbilly. My mother still winces with pain sometimes. >>>>>> _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail