This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Williams, Teague, Earle, Wells Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/4AB.2ACE/5033.2 Message Board Post: This may help as well. BENJAMIN CLARK EARLE, son of John Earle and Nancy Holland Burns, was born in April, 1816, after his parents had migrated to Mississippi. He married, first, about 1840, a Miss Lucas, and was living in Winston County, Miss., when his only son was born, Charles W. Earle of Dodd City, Texas (1843). He soon after moved to Pontotoc County, where he made his home until his death. He was clerk of the county for a number of years, and during part of the time was Tax Collector, till the Yankees made a raid into Pontotoc County. He then went to Texas and bought cotton and stored it away in different places. At the close of the war, it was all taken by some one not known (so said those who had charge of it), and he never got a pound of it or a cent of money for it. His first wife died prior to 1848, and he married Mrs. Newsom, a native of England, whose maiden name was Howell. She had two sons by her first Marriage, R. B. and W. H. Newsom. Benjamin Earle’s mother, Nancy Holland Burns, made her home; with him after her husband’s death, till she succumbed to cancer in 1848. Benjamin C. Earle was considered a man of some means. He owned a good deal of land, mostly in Pontotoc County, and was able to give his son and two stepsons a quarter section of land each, after the war. He owned about twenty slaves. It was told as a sort of family joke that when Nancy Burns Earle went to live with her son, the others, who knew that as a pioneer woman, she always wore homespun of her own making, asked how she intended to dress when she lived with Ben, who wore broadcloth every day. The old lady answered with a good deal of spirit: “If I hadn’t worn homespun and worked hard, he wouldn’t have so much now, and I intend to dress in my own way.” Mr. Earle died of cancer, at the home of his niece, Mrs. E. L. Rouzee, in Pontotoc, Mississippi, Feb. 4, 1868. His second wife survived him nearly twenty years, dying in 1887.