My longest standing brick wall has been DISSOLVED, thanks to lectures by Alexis Hacker Scholz on using probate and Carol Friedel using LucidChart for genealogy. I'm also advocating getting enough sleep and awakening slowly, and just thinking, before springing out of bed. 💤 That is where my inspiration arose, on my pillow.  If we've met and talked about genealogy, you have heard about my McBees and the mystery William McBee, known only as a name on his son Samuel B's death certificate. After Alexis' probate lecture, the gears were turning about how to look for probate files - but where to look? When I heard Carol thinking aloud, and saw her charting out a mystery DNA match, something clicked. The descendancies she was charting look like the Ancestry.com Thrulines®, so why not mine those and see if William's purported father, George Henry McBee and Martha 'Patsey' Willis, could be proven to be his parents? Not just by DNA matches, but by records. Thrulines® ...

Was Sampson Caudill (1784 – 1863) the father of Hugh Caudle(1812--1859)? Genealogists and family historians have long speculated about the identity of the father of Hugh Caudle (1812 – 1859).   Clayton Cox, the genealogist and long-time authority on the Caudill family, never provided an answer. [1] An article in Cordell Clippings , the newsletter of the Cordell Family Association (now inactive) No.10, January 1994, may be the source of the many assertions that Hugh was the son of Sampson Caudle. [2] The Caudills (Caudles, Caddells, Coddles, Cordels, Codills, and many other spellings) are a large and well-documented family.   The first documentation of a Caudle in America is a Virginia Land Grant to Stephen “Cawdle” from King George of England in 1731. [3] By the time of the Revolutionary War, the family had migrated to North Carolina. [4] The family had begun migrating to eastern Kentucky by 1789. [5] TRACKING THE MIGRATION OF TWO FAMILIES In 1820, Sa...