I'm still here, and my email address below should be good. Sometimes that happens to me too. On the sw Missouri counties, I believe the situation (for my family) is even more complicated. I have tried to figure out (using GOODSPEEDS histories of the counties and land records) exactly where the people in the original query (descendants of Matilda Davison) were, or at least where they thought they were, in ca 1850. For a few of them, finding out exactly where they lived is easier than figuring out what county they were considered to be living in. Everyone seems to be in agreement that there was a boundary problem between Newton and Barry which was not completely resolved for many years. The best I can figure it, there was a strip of "no man's land", perhaps almost a mile wide at it's widest (the Arkansas line?) and that strip went right through where some of them SEEM to have been living in 1850. Problems related to that may explain why many of them are not recorded on the 1850 census in either county although lots of other records indicate they were there at the time. Some of these families had members in the Union Army and the pension records offer a lot of insight into the confusion. Many years later, some of the elderly people could tell you exactly where they lived before the War (who their neighbors were, etc...) but were not certain what county it was at that time. Part of this seems to have just been the confusion created when Lawrence County formed, but some of it apparently was the Newton/Barry line dispute. Nathan Branham and a few of the families that lived over toward Ritchey were recorded on that 1850 Newton County census. John Rutledge, Polly (Dill) Rutledge - his sister-in-law and my ancestor, and many others were not. My ancestor John Dill was recorded but he didn't move into the disputed area until about 1853 or so. > Hi, I was trying to get this message to John Dill and it bounced back to > me. > I hope John gets this. Thank you. > From: johndill@ipa.net (John Dill) > Reply-to: MONEWTON-L@rootsweb.com > To: MONEWTON-L@rootsweb.com > > Hi John, > Was just looking through my Red Book and these dates show on the different > counties. > Newton county was made in 1838 from part of Barry county. > McDonald 1849 (first named Seneca then changed to McDonald in 1849) made > from Newton County. > Lawrence 1845 made from Barry/Dale counties > Jasper 1841 from Barry > I hope this helps rather than confuses. Just thought you might like an > idea > of counties you could search in and how when one person lived in one place > for twenty years his address would change. > Jo in California >