This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.families.aol.com/mbexec/msg/an/nNABAIB/2114.1.1.2.1 Message Board Post: Dear Ted, I heard about Laura from Cheryl (Phillips) LaVoy out in Napa, CA. We wondered about Laura. We are descendents of Wm. Hart Phillips and his wife who was a Weld from Erie Co. Cheryl's relatives wouldn't tell her much about their background, but I told her I'd recently found out why in the Ypsi Historical Society Records. Wm. Hart had been accused of raping the daughter of a man whose house he was building (he built about 3/4 of the houses in Ypsi at the time) and was sued for $5000 in the 1870's and paid it. Several years later he sued the man back for the same amount, but died of a stroke before he could finish the suit. He had about 8 boys. Cheryl comes down from George, one of the twins. (Frank was the other.) And I come down from Joseph Hart (called Hart) who was close to them in age. As you noted, Delos also lived in Kalamazoo. He only had girls so we haven't found any descendants from him. Actually, we haven't found any descendants in Kalamazoo where they all lived. All we can do is surmise that Laura's parents died and that one of her uncles, probably Nathaniel or even James (heaven forbid Wm. Hart just in case he did rape that girl) took her in. Have you checked the censuses around the date of her wedding? I don't have the full details--I just know there was a wedding announcement of some kind in the paper, and I've never been in the Eastern Mi. library long enough to try to trace her. I got my great great grandparents' obituaries though. My husband's always in a hurry. It might tell in the census before she was married who she was living with. If her parents died, they might have died around Buffalo and Hamburg since the other brothers apparently came from there. But how you'd identify them I don't know. I have a brick wall there too --I'm unable to find any trace of Olive Weld Phillip's father Josiah or any trace of Wm., James and Nathaniel's parents. I had to give up census searches because of arthritis in my neck (I taugh! t college English and was constantly grading papers). That would be my only chance. I may go to the Mormon geneology room here in town and look at some of their stuff. I know how frustrating it can be. (I'm also stuck on one line of my 4x gr.grandmother, Bathsheba Bennet Wheelock. (Don't you love the names? Her husband was Abijah. There are three Thomas Bennets in the town in Mass. who would be the right age, but no way to tell them apart. All we can do is keep hoping and digging. I'm glad to have heard from you since Cheryl told me about you some time ago. Where do you live now? Did Laura stay in s. eastern MI all her life? I was born in Detroit, raised in Grand Rapids, and went to school at Albion and Michigan. And Iowa later on. We now live in Eau Claire, WI, 90 miles east of the Twin Cities. Our son Chad was married last year and works in New York (for Columbia University, trouble shooting computers for an academic dot com.), and our daughter Megan who' st! ill single lives in New Orleans raising endangered big birds (like the Whooping Crane and Saddlebill Stork.) They are 35 and 31 respectively. Keep in touch and let me know if you find something. You're only the second Phillips cousin I've found--or who has found me! Peg