Vonda, I've just spent a good 45 minutes puzzling over your Wilson family mess. Anybody doing genealogy has to get a good laugh out of people mourning the family values of the "good old days." IMO Catherine has taken a bit too much of the blame, and old David was doing the double family thing. I have a couple of similar tangles in my family tree, and one of them, "Big Bill," fathered 18 kids on an alternating basis between two women. His real faux pas was that the girls were sisters, which did not make him popular with their parents. Anyhow, I think I can shed some light on a couple of other topics. You've seen Tidwell on the post office map in Elmo Ingenthron's book. Tidwell was, as you said, located between Cedar Creek and Protem. Judging by comparison to a current Taney County map, it was probably along what is now Frank Rea Road, north of the Cedar Creek-Protem Road (a pretty, but rough gravel trail that passes the homestead of my great-grandparents). Regarding the Indiana to Missouri move, I have ABBOTT ancestors in Christian County who made that move, as well as LEWISES from Douglas County. Several things contributed to this, most based on what you said about the Ozarks being a good place to be self-sufficient, if not wealthy. First, there was lots of homestead land available here, and that, along with the free land available to Union veterans, provided lots of opportunity here when many families in the central midwest were being hurt financially or losing their land because of a combination of a nationwide depression in the early 1870's and several years of bad crops in the farm belt. Also, if you go back another generation or two, many of the Indiana/Illinois immigrants were originally from those same areas of Kentucky and Tennessee that the original Ozarkians came from, but they left that region for the same reasons many left the Ozarks during the war--it was a bitterly divided border region. Whatever the reasons, the Historical Atlas of Missouri has some maps that show the top three states contributing to immigration to Missouri prior to 1860 were Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, with Tennessee being the major force in the Ozarks. After 1860 that trend shifted to Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana. Ohio was in fourth place in both time periods, and Germany was actually #2 both times. Hope this is helpful, Ingrid