>From List # 181 _____________________________X-Message: #4 Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000 22:18:58 -0800 From: Joseph Broadwell <www.marybroadwell@mindspring.comm> To: NCJOHNST-L@rootsweb.com Message-Id: <200012160618.eBG6Iwg14378@cgi.rootsweb.com> Subject: [NCJOHNST] Broadwell Posted on: Johnston Co. NC Queries Forum Reply Here: http://cgi.rootsweb.com/~genbbs/genbbs.cgi/USA/NC/Johnston/2018 Surname: Lee Otho Davis, Maude Davis, Pearl Wilson Broadwell, Donnie Broadwell ------------------------- I am the grandson of the above and would like any info on them or there acsendants i could get.Iam new at this but am very interested.Please help.Thanks ahead of time.I live in Johnston County,NC.They may have been reered outside of Johnston In response, Ann Massengill writes: hi, joseph! i'm trying to contact you directly -- i can't get through to you on the address as it is shown. i have no information, but I am interested in why you want to know. i teach a class of mid-schoolers in south carolina and am trying to get them interested in finding out about their families as a way to teach them to use computers. boy! they are a SLOW crew! i have noticed that you are starting with your grandparents. that seems to me to be a good place. but maude davis doesn't have a maiden name. maybe you do not know what it is. but if you do, or even if you could guess it, you might put that info out there. say you've got two cousins named "butler" -- one is a girl named "maude butler". then you might infer that your grandmother's maiden name is butler, which you would list as "maude (butler?) davis". if you can get to her maiden name, you have opened up a whole 'nother family line to follow. i can tell you that "otho" is an extremely unusual name. it could be what we call a "corruption" of such a name as "arthur" -- well, we who think we KNOW everything may call the name a "corruption", but in truth it is spelled the way it is spelled because that's the way your family (your ascendants) promounced it. now i ask you: who's right? i notice you use the beautiful old english term "ascendants" instead of the more common "ancestors". i have a nephew who is growing up near beaufort, in the true "down east" section of north carolina, and he uses many of these lovely old english terms. this makes me think that at least one branch of your family may be from somewhere more "down east" than JOCO. such usages are also common to the eastern shore (of virginia, maryland, and delaware) and to some of the sea islands along the south carolina, georgia and florida coasts. some of us use JOCO to mean johnston county. what part of JOCO do you call home? my father was paul robinson massengill, third son of george kemp and mary cornelia (mamie) wilson massengill of four oaks. i notice that there are lots of twins born to JOCO families, and one of the most common sets of names for twins, according to my family records, is "paul" and "pearl". you may find out that your grandmother pearl wilson may have had a twin brother named paul. i would like to follow up the wilson connection with you. i don't have diddly-squat on my massengill grandmother, who lived the longest! we were simply not close to her, as we lived in south carolina and she was in raleigh. i do know that her father was adolphus robinson wilson. i found all this on a scrap of paper my mother had saved: "notes from paul's mother when we were trying to find out family names before wells was born". see? i was the oldest child, and i was named "ann" because it was the shortest name daddy my could think of at the time -- he thought massengill is such a l-o-n-g last name. by the time their fourth child, my bratty little brother wells, was on the way, i reckon they thought they had time to hunt around and find out all the family names in case he turned out to be a girl. i was supposed to have been a boy, and that was that! who were you named for? i don't see any "joseph" among your immediate ascendants. you may be interested to learn that i am one of a bunch of family history nuts who plan to start meeting in JOCO every july. the first meeting will be this year, and it is for representatives of the various families and townships of the county. we don't have much in the way of plans other than to meet and make some. i hope you can attend this meeting and help us out since you live there in JOCO. you can keep my address, as i am keeping yours. you can also check out the website meredith page designed for us. i keep forgetting what it is, but there's SUPPOSED to be a link on the JOCO website. try it and let me know if you can get to it. let me hear from you either directly or on the rootsweb. warren begley has asked us to keep "JOCO heritage week" stuff off the JOCO rootsweb because some people have been confused. i am now switching -- if i did it right -- to the "L" version as we get closer to the steering committee meeting so i can take each one separately. i expect you will be "swamped" with replies. do let me hear from you. with a little motivation, a couple of things i'm writing off to my agent, and better knees, i can go through a bunch of boxes in the storage and see what else i can come up with. life is good. annie