Update on Thomas Presley's "missing" children

Since it's been a good long time since I last posted, I've thankfully got a lot of new information!

**Jennie Presley
As it turns out, I was exactly wrong about my great-something aunt Jennie Presley marrying Charles Lumley. As it turns out, she did, in fact, marry Thomas R. Jackson. She and Tom had no children, and according to her death certificate, she is buried in Fairview Cemetery in Dyersburg. I found her obituary and it confirms that, even though there's no listing for her on the Dyer County GenWeb page. I'll have to contact the cemetery to find her stone. Tom was buried in Pleasant Hill near his father. As seem to have happened a lot, all the Presleys are listed as Presslers in her obit, but one thing it does add is that brother Bob is listed again, this time as living in Sikeston, MO.

**Robert George Presley
I recently turned up Robert, long lost Uncle Bob, in the 1920 census in Dunklin County, MO. This gave me a list of his children (as well as a middle name...George...I'd had him as Robert P. Presley, though attempting to verify that, I couldn't find him listed that way in any of my sources...typo, I guess). He next turned up in the 1930 census in Granite City, Illinois, working in a steel foundry along with his bother Claude who I'd found previously. His WWI draft card actually lists him as George Robert.

I've now managed to trace a couple of his descendant lines to the present, I just need to see if I can dig up some sort of contact information for the family. It would seem his children pretty much stayed around the boot heel of Missouri in Dunklin, Scott & Cape Girardeau counties. Still no idea when or where he died, but as I previously mentioned, Jennie's obituary has him still living as of May 1955. He'd be 75 then, so I'm getting closer!

**Emma Presley
With the help of a letter from my great aunt Dru to another cousin of mine, I figured out that Emma Presley really was a sister to my great grandfather, James Richard Presley. As the Dyer County Genweb shows, she married John Bartin Wilson in 1899. However, I can't find John & Emma anywhere in the 1900 or 1910 census, and John has remarried and had children with his second wife by 1920. John & Emma had at least two children, Clarice (who would marry Luther Burns) and Johnny Fred (who also seems to end up near the IL/MO Steel industry in East St. Louis. As it is, I only have the evidence of their marriage for Emma. She was apparently was born after 1880, the 1890 is gone, can't find her in 1910...

I'm speculating that Emma died somewhere between 1905-1912. Unfortunately, she's not listed in any death records, funeral home records or cemetery listings I can find. Given when she likely died, she'd probably be buried in Pleasant Hill, but I have nothing pointing that direction aside from family tradition in that time period. On the upside, Clarice had some 9 children with Luther Burns, so maybe I can track one of them down and ask (though at least three have already died).

A year already?

Sadly, an entire year has elapsed since my last entry here. In that time, I completed my transition from Family Tree Maker to Legacy Family Tree. This was a wonderful thing as Legacy does such a great job of keeping me organized. I've managed to clean up dozens of sources, standardize some spellings on place names and even gone as far as printing up a rough draft of my eventual Descendents of Fisher A. Deming book.

In the past year, I did managed to find some deed records for Fisher A. Deming on the Chatham County Register of Deeds website which help support the inclusion of his middle initial. Still no idea what it stands for, but the current front runners are Alden and Adler (though I suppose Ammi might be another possibility as that was a repeated name in the Deming family in Connecticut).

I exchanged correspondance with a few newly discovered cousins from different lines. Two Deming cousins and even a Bolles cousin (Hi Sabrina, sorry I haven't written lately!). The Deming cousins, Jerry Dixon and Billy McClendon have been great help in filling out the Dixon/Deming and Burke/Deming lines that migrated from North Carolina to Texas (and beyond).

The only real news on the Presley/Preslar front is that I only recently figured out how to tie the Dyer County, Tennessee Presley and Preslar lines together. While both lines are descended from John Preslar/Presley (son of Hans Jurie Pressler), the Dyer County Preslar line comes down through John's son Stephen, while the Dyer County Presley line comes down thru John's son Joshua. So, just as most of us thought...we are related back there somewhere!

In another exciting turn of events, I was contacted by a Carpenter cousin (Hi Barry!), with whose help I've been able to tie Mary Elizabeth Carpenter's father John L. back into the rest of the Carpenter clan in Anson County, North Carolina. With Barry's help, I was able to walk back through the census and found that the Carpenters were in Anson County at least as long as the Preslars, usually with in a few miles of each other! I've not had much luck tracking down any of Mary's siblings any farther than 1880, so there's still a lot of work to be done.

As far as resources on the web, the arrival of Footnote.com to the web has been a major boost with their publishing all of the complete Revolutionary War Pension records online along with constant updates to Civil War Service Records from at least 5 states so far. Pricing realities finally caught up with the Godfrey Memorial Library and they had to re-structure their subscriptions, losing access to Newsbank along the way.

Well, that's been a huge relief to get in type, so I'll leave it here and pick up the rest of the recap later when I can actually recall it.