Wright Sellers was my great grandfather's Richard M. Sellars uncle, though great grandpa disclaimed kinship to any of the other Sellers in the Thomas County area, and his children took him so seriously on that they even made a point of spelling their surname as Sellars and then claiming that as a distinction, even though they knew that he couldn't write and "didn't know how to spell his own name". That may be a bit of a cheap shot because great grandpa was anything but dumb and it was really his middle name that she was talking about when my grandmother Martha Bama Sellars White wrote that about her father in her autobiography. One of great grandpa's sons ended up spelling that middle name Maze when he handed it down to a grandson, but based on my research Richard M. Sellars middle name was the last name of his paternal grandmother, Nancy Moye, wife of William Sellers. For a long time I've thought that in spite of his disclaiming, great grandpa knew about this kinship... but that there seems to be a common thread here that runs through the behavior of both him and my grandfather Charley Henry White. They were both orphans, and the both claimed not to have any kin though there were kinfolks living all around them. My take on this is that if those kin didn't help them back when they were children and needed a hand getting started in the world, they weren't kin after they had "made it". There was also a bond between my grandfather and his father-in-law, my great grandfather, because of their mutual experience in being orphans. Neither of them ever said that so far as I know, but their behavior as reflected in great grandpa's male grandchildren's behavior did. One of my cousins, Narcissus Sellars Hudson who was sister & cousin to them, said that a group of great grandpa's grandsons ganged up and confronted grandpa White when he was walking across great grandpa's land (Richard M. Sellars eventually acquired a lot of land... more than 1,000 acres), beat him up, and told him never to set foot on great grandpa's land again. In other words, they resented grandpa and and according to what my cousin told me, the cause of it was that they felt that great grandpa favored grandpa (his son-in-law) over them (his grandsons). Anyway, where I'm going with this is as follows. Although Richard M. Sellars' grandfather, William Sellers, and several of William's other sons and at least one daughter settled in Thomas County, his father Jacob Benjamin Sellers peeled out of the family on its southward migration and cycled back and forth around the areas of Pulaski, Sumter, Dooley, and Calhoun counties. At age 14 Richard M. Sellars joined Company B of the 11th Georgia Infantry Regiment in Pulaski County when he heard that his father had died after joining the 51st Georgia Infantry Regiment in Calhoun County. But his mother also died the same year (1862) and when Richard M. Sellars was disability discharged later that year he had no home to return to, so apparently he was taken under the wing of a family in Lee County where Company B of the 11th Georgia had been raised... as he was living there in Lee County at the time of Georgia's 1864 Militia survey. I don't know exactly when Richard M. Sellars left Lee County and ended up in Thomas County but the next record that I found with his name on it is the record of his marriage to my great grandmother Mary Ann Haven, in Thomas County, in 1874. Though I don't have a specific date for this, by then he seems to have begun to "make his fortune" by acquiring part interest in a grist mill in Thomas County. But surely there he had *some* knowledge that a lot of his family lived in Thomas County. It would seem a very unlikely occurrence that he just happened to wander there out of all of the many other places in the wide world that he could have turned towards. So, in that light, here is an interesting tidbit about Wright Sellers that I just found in a newly published history of Grady County, Georgia (Grady was cut out of the western portion of Thomas County and the eastern portion of Decatur County in 1906, and Richard M. Sellars' home and mills ended up in Grady County at that time: "John Jones was captain of GMD 753 north of Duncanville in western Thomas County, the newest of the five Grady districts. Captain Jones' district reported two men employed in granite and marble work. The district had three sawmills and three gristmills, including mills operated by John J. Cooper, Right Sellers, and Richard W. Singletary. Of ninety-two householders, thirteen - about one seventh - had slave workers, and none was a planter." SOURCE: _The Genesis of Grady County, Georgia_, by Gwendolyn Brock Waldorf (Sentry Press, Tallahassee, Florida: 2006) pages 70 & 71. So, not only did Richard M. Sellars gravitate to where a substantial part of his family was living, Thomas County... he also took up the same gainful occupation as his uncle Wright Sellers' (who lived there). Possibly this was all coincidental. In the absence of any specific information in either direction, it's hard to say absolutely. But for my money, there was some kind of connection. The quote above was not precise as to time frame, but appears to relate to an era around 1835-1845 based on comments in related footnotes... and of course Richard M. Sellars didn't arrive in the area till at the earliest, 1865, at least some 20 years later. But still, this doesn't feel like sheer coincidence to me. I wonder if Richard M. didn't actually get started in that trade by working for Wright sometime in that decade of non-information between 1864 and 1874. Well, maybe the connection wasn't quite that direct, because birthplaces of Wright's children indicate that like his father William, and sister Elizabeth Sellers Peacock wife of Alexander Peacock, he had relocated slightly northerly to Baker County, in his case by 1850, and I don't have a death date for Wright. One other possible connection, and possible coincidence, though, was that Wright's wife was Mary Ann Merritt. They had married in Duplin County, North Carolina, on 5 October 1832... just before William (based on marriage places of his children Jacob Benjamin Sellers and Elizabeth Sellers) was in Pulaski County, Georgia, in the mid-1830s. Richard M. Sellars wife Mary Ann Haven's grandmother, Abigail Blackshear Gill Welch, after her grandfather Richard Welch had died in Thomas County around 1860, remarried to Parson Jonathan Merritt in Decatur County. I don't have Jonathan Merritt's place of birth, but Richard Welch was born in Iredell County, North Carolina, and Abigail was also born somewhere in North Carolina. Again, that was possibly a coincidence, but the possible coincidences sure are are piling up, because by my count that makes three of them. Richard White Tallahassee, Florida