Although this bunch of COOPERs and BRAYs both ended up in South Texas, both families started out in North Carolina. It is also a curious twist of fate that our first two daughters were born there during "our" stint with the Marine Corps.After their military involvement in both the Revolution and the Civil War, our Scotch-Irish forefathers followed the route common for southern farm migration: North Carolina,South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama,Mississippi, Arkansas, to Texas.
Surnames included: SMITHWICK, DUGGAN, MANNING, DAWKINS, LANE, ATKINSON, LITTLE, LEWIS, WALLACE, O'BANNON, RUSHING, on my mother's side and COOPER, MARSHALL, BYARS, SCOGIN, KING,FLOWERS, and MCGINNIS on my husband's. Also, on his mother's line, AVANTS, SHIELDS, ROGAN, AND SHEPPHERD.
My mother-in-law's grandfather, Peter ROGAN, lied about his age being 14, and along with his two younger brothers, worked his way across on a ship from Scotland.
My father's family branched off into Tennessee and Kentucky along the Cumberland area before ariving in Arkansas.
Surnames on that side include:BRAY, HOWERTON, GOLDEN, STEVENSON,and SWEARINGIN.
I am fascinated by the "laws of proximity", or maybe it's just my romantic nature that recognizes something fateful about families that followed parallel paths until two partners got together. My father and father-in-law both worked for the same company in south Texas, but it wasn't until after living in two seperate locations at the same time that my husband and I finally got together. Such is the case with our ancestors, traveling a similar route until Fate brought them to the same spot. For example, a curious piece of my parents' history involves a family doctor. My father's father was killed in a construction cave-in in Devol,Cotton Co.,OK in 1921, at the age of 41. My father was only two and a half years old. A year later, my mother was born in Burkburnet, Wichita Co., TX. Since the two towns are just across the Red River from each other, the doctor must have been a "circuit" doctor--the same doctor that signed my grandfather's death certificate also delivered my mother. My parents met and married in Seminole, OK, twenty two years later.
If any of these surnames match who you're searching for, let me hear from you---I love new cousins.
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