She is a very sweet lady, and has helped many of us out, and has great really great stories about our families but... She doesn't always match up the documentation right on the folks way way back there. Specifically when it comes to Revolutionary War Grants, there is a big problem. Okay - David Allison did get a hugh land grant in return for his military service. That discovery pretty much got all the local researchers into a land grant frenzy. So if you are trying to find out how John Owen ended up in Transylvania County, you can go to the library and get a book with NC Revolutionary Land Grants where you will find that John Owen received an NC land grant. Easy to conclude that John was named after his father and that they arrived here to find their land grant. WRONG. Ditto with William Parker. Problem is that Owen & Parker are not exactly unusual names. And I sometimes believe there was once a law requiring a William & John in every family. Here are the specifics if you ever run into a land grant rumor. Present day Hogback, Gloucester, & Eastatoe in Transylvania County (the souther thirdish of the county) were all pretty much in Land Grant 230 to George Lattimer in 1796, except the part that was still Cherokee, well okay, it included some parts that were still Cherokee which were later voided in a messy NC Supreme Court Case Brown vs Smathers as a result. If you are really into this stuff - the details are in "The History of Land Titles in Western North Carolina" by George A Smathers, who was the attorney for The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians way back when they were trying to become legal. In Elizabeth Barton's defense, once she gets down to John Owen & Lavinia Parker, her accuracy goes way up. Yes, we know James Owen was a soldier on the Trail of Tears in 1838 and we are missing say a couple of decades I believe before his son and neice eloped on the way to to Towns County GA as James was fleeing the area to save his skin. Considering that following The Cherokee Removal, many of them came back over the next few dacades, it is possible that the brother he made mad by killing a Cherokee had just arrived back from the reservation when he left town. Of course he could have just recently killed someone else. For some reason lots of people fled to Towns County GA when they had made someone mad enought to shoot them. Not sure what they did in Towns Co to attract this kind of attention. As for the Owen & Parker families. I suspect they came up from South Carolina like most early settlers, leaving just enought paper to tease us then quickly dissappearing again. Linda Hoxit Raxter lraxter@citcom.net See Indexed Western North Carolina Cemetery Surveys http://www.geocities.com/~alextreehouse related to at least half the county - at least once ; )