A few years ago, I wouldn't have had a very old Pearce to claim. I had hit a wall with 4 Pearces (Samuel b 1812, Jeremiah b 1817, John b 1800, and Polly b 1796) who moved to Henderson County, Tennessee from some where in North Carolina around 1830. Samuel and Polly stayed in Henderson County. John and Jeremiah moved to NE Arkansas around 1860. Samuel's son, Jeremiah Dillon Pearce moved to Lonoke, Arkansas after the war where my Grand Father Hubert was born. Then I got E-mail from Martha Pearce in South Mills N.C. responding to a query I had posted. She connected my Pearces to her Camden County, N.C. Pearces. She had data on James Pearce who was born around 1765 near Little Compton, Rhode Island and moved to Camden County around 1690. That was really neat. She had data saying that my 4 Pearces left 3 brothers behind in South Mills when they moved to Tennessee. Next, Martha then introduced me to Tom Melson who had traced our James back through several Pearces in Rhode Island to Richard Pearce born about 1615 in Briston England. That was really neat too. When I compared Tom's data to the Pearces in "Pearce, Bartlett, Matthews, Smart, and Allied Families", by James Alonzo Matthews. I got the surprise of my genealogy life. Tom's oldest Pearces were at the bottom of the tree in the book. "Pearce Genealogy ...", By Frederick Pierce published in 1888 provided a lot of the same data tying my line back to the early R.I. and Percy folk. I would not be surprised to find that James Matthews used Frederick Pierce's book for a source. Also, the DAR library provided additional data on my Pearce folk in Rhode Island during the Colonial period. Richard Pearce (generation 21 in the Mathews book) was the founder of Pearce Hall at York, England, where he lived and died. He was the first to change the spelling of Percy name to Pearce. The oldest Percy-Pearce in the Matthews book is Grover Percy of Somerset who was herald in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. He was born in the early 900s. Its worth noting that a lot of the Rhode Island data interchanges the Pearce, Pierce, and Pearse. However, Pearce is the most common spelling for my crowd. Its interesting that a couple of the books say that Richard Percy changed his name to Richard Pearce in 1500 and founded Pearce Hall. I've never seen anything indicating the start of the Pierce spelling or what it means to found a Hall. Does anyone have any data. My biggest gap is a lack of Original Proof data on James' children who were born in Camden County, N.C. and moved to Tennessee. Does anyone have any data??? The DAR and LDS libraries have a lot of good books on the Pearce folk in R.I. during the Colonial period. WWP Linda & Warren Pearce Colorado Springs CO 80919-4821