Dear List Members and Fellow Researchers, I'm a descendant of Beverly Cornelius who was the son of William and Lettice Cornelius of the Greenville District of South Carolina in the late 1700's and early 1800's and of Blount County, Alabama where they died and are buried. I've been trying for years to document each generation of my Cornelius line and have being trying to collect an actual document that shows proof of each Marriage and each event in the lives of all my direct line of Cornelius Ancestry. For years now, I've seen in many online and off-line genealogy databases (including LDS, Worldconnect, Ancestry.com, Rootsweb, etc.) that Beverly Cornelius, my proven gggg-grandfather, was married to a woman named "Nancy Euphemia Smith" (some databases spelled her name "Euphemia Nancy Smith"). Over the years, I've tried to contact different authors of these databases to inquire as to where they got the name "Nancy Euphemia Smith" and what source of document they were using to obtain this name and the marriage date of said Beverly Cornelius to his first wife. To this day, know one has been able to show proof to me, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Beverly Cornelius did in fact marry a "Nancy Euphemia Smith" and exactly what day they were married on and where this event occurred. In all my years of searching, I've never found an actual document to support who the first wife of Beverly Cornelius was, who was also the mother of all his children. Beverly married his second wife, Phebe/Phoebe Moss, on November 8, 1858 in Blount County. Beverly and Phoebe never had children together. The 1850 Blount County Census, which doesn't list relationships, only sex and age, only shows Beverly Cornelius and a woman named simply "Nancy". Not "Nancy E.", "Nancy Euphemia" or any other variation, just "Nancy". To make things more complicated, the 1850 Census, enumerated on Oct. 30, 1850, shows this Nancy Cornelius, supposedly w/o Beverly Cornelius, was 42 years old and born in South Carolina (11 years younger than Beverly who was listed at age 53 which is incorrect). The second female in the household was Cincinnati age 32, which is a known fact to be the daughter of Beverly Cornelius. Nancy couldn't have given birth at the age of ten, so is she Beverly's wife with an error in the age, or someone else? At the time of the birth of Beverly Cornelius' first child ca. 1818, the family was near the end of their settlement in Greenville, SC and moving to Blount Co., AL. Greenville County, SC didn't start recording Marriages until the 20th century, so the hopes of finding proof of a marriage there is nearly impossible, unless a church kept a record there or a family bible had the event recorded (but did it survive the years? Who knows!). If perhaps the Nancy mentioned in the 1850 Census is indeed Beverly's first wife, then they had to have been married in SC, but where and when? Any ideas? If Nancy was his wife, when did she die? She was living on Oct. 30, 1850 when the enumerator came knocking, but Beverly re-married in 1858 to Phoebe, so she had to have died sometime between then in Blount Co. Where was she buried? Maybe Remlap Cemetery in one of those unmarked graves I've mapped out next to Beverly Cornelius' tombstone? Please, I need help in locating any actual documents that would help show proof or answer any of these questions above. I'm not interested in online databases or Latter Day Saints Files, only actual primary government documents or of the like. I would also like to ask anyone whose contributed databases to online websites to please re-evaluate the information given on the family of Beverly Cornelius. In trying to locate various documentation about the information given, I've unfortunately seen tons of errors and undocumented data, which causes confusion among other researchers and can easily contaminate other databases. If anyone is interested in learning more about the family of Beverly Cornelius or has evidence about the his first marriage and the mother of his children, please feel free to contact me at rcj@mindspring.com . I'd love to talk with you and share with you what I've collected in the way of documentation on this Cornelius family of Blount County, Alabama. Thanking you in advance for your time, Robert C. Johnston, Jr. 139 Eagle Creek Drive Wetumpka, AL 36092 USA rcj@mindspring.com