This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Bomar, McMillin, Cooley, Speace, Younger, Blackwood, Gramling, Cothran, Bowlin, Hogan, Wilcockson, Smith, Otts, Brock, Danley, Kennemer, Martin, Pack, Treadway, Pinkney Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/EgB.2ACI/1364.1375 Message Board Post: Gail, One pair of my mother’s great-great grandparents was Robert McMillin and Susan (Bomar) McMillin of the Spartanburg District of South Carolina. They are buried in what is now Spartanburg County, South Carolina, at the New Prospect Baptist Church Cemetery, west of Chesnee on SC State 11. Their son William Pinkney McMillin married Adaline Cooley in1842. I believe Adaline (Cooley) McMillin was the daughter of Edmund Cooley and Charlotte (Speace) Cooley. If I have my facts straight, Susan (Bomar) McMillin (1806-1861) was an older sister of Spencer Bomar (1810-1884). Both were children of Armistead Bomar and Elizabeth (Younger) Bomar. Again, if I’m correct, my mother’s great grandfather, William Pinkney McMillin (1822-1862), and your great-great-great grandfather, Dr. William Pinkney Bomar (1838-1873), were first cousins. In 1853, William and Adaline McMillin moved from South Carolina to Cache Township, Greene County, Arkansas. It appears they settled on part of Crowley’s Ridge, a narrow arc of rolling, forested hills surrounded by the flat bottomlands of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, where they purchased the 500-acre "Old Wilcockson Place." William and Adaline brought two South Carolina-born daughters, Martha Jane and "Cede," with them to Arkansas. Their third daughter, my mother’s grandmother, Caroline S. McMillin, was born in Arkansas in March 1857. I don’t know if William and Adaline were the pioneers in the move from Spartanburg District to Greene County. I do know that others followed, and I keep finding more who did. South Carolina-born Ruben Martin Gramling and at least two of his adult sons -- Joseph Richard “Uncle Dick” Gramling and Benjamin Martin Gramling -- moved their families to Cache Township, Greene County, between 1855 and 1860. Ruben and son Joseph appear to have been wagonwrights/blacksmiths. I’m not sure of the order in which they arrived. They were from Spartanburg District, but it appears at least Benjamin Gramling and his wife Mary (Wilson) Gramling came to Arkansas from Georgia. I know that members of the Gramling family still live in what was Spartanburg District, as do members of the Cooley family. Reuben Gramling (1791-1865), Benjamin M. Gramling (1816-1894), and Mary (Wilson) Gramling (1818-1870), along with other Gramling kin, are buried in the Owen’s Chapel Cemetery, Greene County. Other Gramling’s are buried in the Pruett's Chapel Cemetery and Warren's Chapel Cemetery, both in Greene County. At least three South Carolina-born members of the Cothran (also Cothren, Cothrew, and Cothrew) family -- Andrew George (b. 1841), F.L. (female, b. 1848), and Pressley M. (b. 1850) -- came with the Gramling’s to Arkansas. Pressley Cothrew was born in Spartanburg District. My guess is that Andrew and F.L. Cothran were born there too. Sarah Gramling (1818-1859), a daughter of Ruben Martin Gramling and Martha (Key) Gramling, had married a Jackson Cothran (1808-1857). The three Cothran’s who moved with the Gramling’s to Greene County could have been their children, but I know there were other Gramling-Cothran marriages as well. Four members of the Cooley family are also buried at Warren’s Chapel. They are John W. Cooley (1860-1940), his wife Elizabeth Cooley (1870-1940), James B. Cooley (1893-1920), and Rody A. Cooley (1895-1897), a daughter of “J.W. and M.E. Cooley.” I have yet to figure out who these Cooley’s were and if they might have been connected to Adeline (Cooley) McMillin. William and Elizabeth (Otts) Smith, who were also from South Carolina, moved to Greene County, Arkansas, in 1859. Their daughter Mary Jane would later marry Memory Chapman Gramling, a Spartanburg District-born (1839) son of Benjamin and Mary Gramling. William Pinkney McMillin’s sister and brother-in-law, Mary Caroline (McMillin) Blackwood and Theron “Them” Blackwood, appear to have followed them to Greene County. However, Them and Mary Caroline do not appear to have gone straight from South Carolina, but came by way of Georgia, where they may have lived for as long as a decade before moving to Arkansas about 1857. As with Benjamin and Mary Gramling, I don’t know exactly where in Georgia Them and Mary Caroline Blackwood lived. I suspect it may have been in Walker County, where Spencer Bomar, Mary Caroline (McMillin) Blackwood’s first cousin too, moved from Spartanburg District. I do know that other families in Greene County, some with links to Spartanburg District, South Carolina, came to Arkansas from Walker County, Georgia. John H. Bowlin and Lucinda (Hogan) Bowlin were born and married (1842) in Spartanburg District. They had twin daughters there. By 1850, they moved to the East Armuchee area of Walker County, Georgia, where they had two sons and a daughter. About 1856, they moved to Greene County, Arkansas, where they had another daughter and two sons, one a William P. (another William Pinkney?). Three of John and Lucinda Bowlin’s children married into the Wilcockson family. John Bowlin joined the Confederate Army and was killed in the Battle of Pea Ridge (7-8 March 1862) in northwest Arkansas. Lucinda Bowlin is buried at the Mount Zion Cemetery in Walcott, Greene County. William Pinkney McMillin joined the 7th Arkansas Infantry (CSA) and died on 19 May 1862, reportedly at a camp in Mississippi. His widow Adaline died on 2 April 1882. Adaline (Cooley) McMillin, Mary Caroline (McMillin) Blackwood (d. 1886), and Theron Blackwood (d. 1876) are also buried at the Mount Zion Cemetery. There is a headstone there for William Pinkney McMillin, but it’s not clear if he was buried there or in Mississippi. There appears to have been at least one Gramling-Blackwood marriage in Greene County. Joseph R Gramling (1852-1909) married Mary Blackwood (1854-1882). I believe Mary E. (Blackwood) Gramling was a Georgia-born daughter of Them Blackwood and Mary Caroline (McMillin) Blackwood. I believe her husband was a South Carolina-born son of “Uncle Dick” Gramling and his wife Cynthia. Joseph R. Gramling (Jr.?) and Mary (Blackwood) Gramling are buried at Warren’s Chapel. In 1850, Georgia-born Charles Brock and his first wife Cynthia were neighbors of John and Lucinda Bowlin in the East Armuchee area of Walker County, Georgia. By 1870, John had lost his first wife, married again to a woman named Elizabeth, and moved to Greene County, Arkansas, apparently by way of Missouri. Between 1850 and 1859, Atlas J. Danley and Lucinda Elizabeth (Kennemer) Danley moved to Greene County, Arkansas, from the East Armuchee area of Walker County, Georgia, where they had been neighbors of John and Lucinda Bowlin. They had two children in Georgia and at least six more in Arkansas. In 1880, there appear to have been a considerable number of other members of Lucinda Danley’s Kennemer family (also spelled Canamore, Kamaner, Kennamour, Kennemarre, and Kennemore) in Greene County. The older members of the family were born in South Carolina (Pendleton District?), and the younger members were born in Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas. I know at least some of the Georgia-born Kennemer’s, like Lucinda (Kennemer) Danley, were from Walker County. I understand other Kennemer’s moved from Walker County, Georgia, to Craighead County, Arkansas, in the 1850s. Craighead County sits immediately south of Greene County. About 1858, South Carolina-born George W. Martin, his wife Elizabeth, their two children, and George’s brother Beverly moved from the East Armuchee area of Walker County, Georgia, to Cache Township, Greene County, Arkansas. Between 1850 and 1860, Tennessee-born Isaac Pack and his South Carolina-born wife Adaline brought their two sons -- South Carolina-born John and Georgia-born Jesse -- from West Armuchee, Walker County, George, to Cache Township, Greene County. South Carolina-born John C. and Rebecca Treadway moved with as many as eight children from East Armuchee, Walker County, Georgia, to Concord Township, Greene County, Arkansas. In Georgia, they had been neighbors of the John Bowlin and Atlas Danley families. I’ll stop here, but the more I dig, the more Walker County-Greene County connections I find. Getting back to William Pinkney McMillin and William Pinkney Bomar. I would be surprised to learn that William Pinkney was a long-standing family name before William Pinkney McMillin and William Pinkney Bomar. I’d be more surprised to learn that they weren’t two of a considerable many men of the time who were named after William Pinkney (1764-1822), constitutional lawyer, seventh Attorney General of the United States (1811-1814), veteran of the War of 1812, Congressman, Envoy to Naples, Minister to Russia, and US Senator. I’d be glad to compare notes with you. Clete P.S. I considered the possibility that Spencer Bomar’s wife Mary Jane might have been a McMillin; however, if she was, she arrived in America much later than the rest of the McMillin family. In the 1880 census, the Spencer Bomar (Boamar on the LDS transcription) household shows Mary Jane as having been born on the Atlantic Ocean. That’s consistent with the nativity data for her son Edward Bomar and daughters Mary (Bomar) Robinsen and Susan (Bomar) McWilliams, who were in other Walker County households in 1880.