This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/YQw.2ACEB/174.1.3 Message Board Post: Good Morning-- I want to postscript some thoughts to you that I pondered over the MLK holiday. Perhaps these will aid you in your search for the origins of the Black Liddells of Mississippi. Then again, it may raise an unsurmountable barrier for you. I don't know but hope it will help. As I wrote during our private exchange off this board, I lived for a while in Jackson, Mississippi and was aware of there being Black Liddells in that city. I never met any of them but was just aware of them. Now--both then and now--I have no way to explain their use of the Liddell name, which as I wrote you originates in Scotland, though I add here that this is true if the name is pronounced with a Bell rhyme. If with a Fiddle rhyme, then there is an England origin and no DNA relationship at all. OK. That stated, I now address the White Liddells of Mississippi. There are two groups, one arrived as pioneers about 1830 or so following the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit. They were small-tract farmers in the hills where the land does not lend itself to plantation-size agriculture. They were not slave-owners as a result and there are no Black Liddells in the hills of Mississippi--which would have probably resulted from their slaves, if they had owned any, adopting their surnames following the War. Since there are no Black Liddells in this area, this quite obviously did not happen and is additional evidence that they were not slave-owners prior to the War. The White Liddells in the Jackson area did not move into Mississippi until about 1880, long after the War and certainly after the end of slavery. Here, as in the Mississippi hills, there is no opportunity for newly-freed slaves to adopt their past owners' surname simply because the White Jackson-area Liddells weren't in the area until after slavery ended. So, I have asked myself. Why are there Black Liddells in Jackson? I simply don't know and have no easy explaination for this. Will you consider a conjecture of mine, which incidentally is the only reasonable explaination that I can come up with? Here is the background for my surmise. Jackson was fought over by the Union and Confederate armies at least eight times and its possession exchanged hands four times during the War. That's why it came to be called "Chimneyville" for a long time, since chimneys were about that was still standing toward the end. Everything else had been burned down or destroyed during combat. People, Black and White alike, were literally living in their yards and on the streets. Great hunger and physical deprivation was common for all civilians regardless of their race. >From my studies, I know that the Northern branches of the Liddell "family" contributed soldiers and sailers to the Northern Cause, and that some of these served in Union armies in the Central South, which of course includes Mississippi. My conjecture in attempting to explain Black Liddells living in Jackson is that --perhaps--a family or two of Blacks newly liberated from slavery received a great kindness from a Union army Liddell officer, and in casting around for a name to use in, say, registering for an issue of food or medical treatment, they adopted that officer's name for their own since they had no surname of their own as slaves. That's the best I can do for you. Perhaps the event was not as I propose there. Perhaps the details were greatly different. But this conjecture is as likely as any, I think. You are welcomed to explore other avenues of course. But I think you will be totally wasting your time in pursuing any connection--blood-link or former master-slave relationship--between Black Liddells and White Liddells. The usual possible connections--including those of the Hemmings/Jefferson type--just aren't there. Again, best wishes. Jim Liddell