Complicated Pennington Connections

There are a lot of complicated family lines that I have studied through the years…some have well established family lines that have been documented and stretch back to Europe.  Others are fortunate if they stretch back to the mid 1700’s.  DNA has told us that the Pennington's who came from the Ashe Co., NC area are genetically linked…but once you get back a generation or two in the 1700’s, there hasn’t been any documentation located yet that establishes a clear relationship.  So, having said that, I decided many years ago to concentrate on all of the Pennington's who came through Ashe Co., NC and not just the family that I descend from…you might say I started this because of a tie between my Dollar family and the Pennington family.

I have written before about the two Andrews Penningtons (A Tale of Two Andrews…) and you might say that I am revisiting one of those lines.  Research has told me that if I am looking at a family who lives in the Washington Co., VA area or nearby, I am looking at a descendant of Group 30 and most likely one of Andrew Pennington and Hester Ann Blevins.  Andrew lived to be 71 years of age and Hester was 78 when she passed.  Both were buried in the Laurel Cemetery in Smyth Co., VA.  They had eleven children and while they all lived relatively near their parents…they were scattered around Ashe Co., NC, Johnson Co., TN, Washington Co., VA and Smyth Co., VA.  I found one of these daughters of Andrew and Hester while researching my Dollar family.

Mary Matilda Pennington was born 11 Jul 1842 in Ashe Co., NC and died on 2 Mar 1920 at Little Fall, Ashe Co., NC.  She married Calvin Calhoun Davis on 25 Jul 1861.  Calvin was the son of Jordan Anderson Davis and Cynthia Lynch.  It looks as if Calvin and Mary Matilda Pennington married and then he left to fight in the Civil War.  Of course that might have been when the marriage had a license or bond that was obtained…their oldest child was born on 6 May 1861 in Ashe Co., NC…a few months preceding their marriage license.  Calvin evidently went to the war and ended up a prisoner at Elmira prison…for their next child appears on 19 Dec 1865.  You might say that Mary Matilda Pennington was one of the reasons that I started researching all of the Penningtons in the area.  I kept running into Penningtons that I couldn’t identify and it was frustrating.  Mary Matilda’s son, Ezra Edward Davis had a daughter named Ethel Davis.  (She just died a few years ago at the age of almost 102)  Ethel was married to Chester Lyall, who was the son of Amanda Jane Dollar and William Davis Lyall.  One of my habits is to try and find the parents of a spouse in case the information might prove useful in the future.  This information proved very useful. 

Amanda Dollar was the older sister of my great great grandfather, John Dula Dollar and they were both children of Alexander Monroe Dollar and Elizabeth Pennington.  So, when Amanda Dollar’s son married a Pennington descendant (Ethel Davis), I got curious. I was told by Ethel’s son that his grandparents were Ezra Edward Davis and Sina Miller and that he had heard of a Pennington connection.  So, I tried to take it a bit further.  Ezra was the son of a Tildie Pennington and C. C. Davis.  After more research I discovered that their full names were Mary Matilda Pennington and Calvin Calhoun Davis.  While Mary Matilda was mostly referred to as Matilda or Tildie….that was her full name.  So, her parents were Andrew Pennington and Hester Blevins…so now I started working on that family tree.  Just because I always like to include the parents, I did a little more checking and found out that Sina E. Miller was the daughter of Eli Miller and Allie Hart…I couldn’t help looking further and found out that Sina’s grandmother was a Blevins and when I put her name into my genealogy program it popped out a red flag and asked me if the Bathsheba Blevins was the same one who married Isaac Miller.  I found out that she was…and found yet again another Pennington link.  Bathsheba was the daughter of Elizabeth Pennington and Wells Blevins.  Elizabeth was Andrew Pennington’s sister…and Wells Blevins was Hester’s brother…so now the tree became even more complicated.

Most who have studied the Pennington family have stayed with their own particular line.  Going straight back as far as they could and not looking at the siblings and their families.  It don’t know if it is a sickness of mine…but I have hard time not poking around to see what else I might discover.  So, my research is almost always in a state of flux and I doubt that I will ever have a complete picture of the Penningtons of Ashe Co., NC.  There are too many branches that have yet to be explored.  You might say it all started when I discovered that Amanda Dollar’s son married a granddaughter of a Pennington…and I just had to figure out who it was!

My Pennington Line

My Pennington line comes through Elizabeth Pennington, daughter of Levi Pennington and Elizabeth Henson.  She married Alexander Monroe Dollar on 17 Jan 1857 and they had four children:

• Amanda Jane Dollar b. 6 Apr 1858 Creston, Ashe Co., NC d. 01 Nov 1938 Ashe Co., NC
• John Dula Dollar b. 3 Oct 1863 Creston, Ashe Co., NC d. 6 Dec 1933 Atlanta, Fulton Co., GA
• Emeline Caroline Dollar b. 15 Mar 1866 Ashe Co., NC d. 10 Dec 1954 Burdine, Letcher Co., KY
• Roby Smith Dollar b. 18 Apr 1868 Creston, Ashe Co., NC d. 21 Apr 1944 Mountain City, Johnson Co., TN

Amanda Jane Dollar married William Davis Lyall on 3 Aug 1881 in Ashe Co., NC and had 10 children.  I know that my grandmother corresponded by letter with at least one of her Lyall cousins – Ennis.  I’ve read references to her in my grandmother’s diary’s.  Amanda never left Ashe Co., NC for Laurel Bloomery, Johnson Co., TN – she was recorded with her uncle (Larkin Pennington) in the 1880 census and is married by 1881. She is buried with her husband at the William M. Lyall Family Cemetery, Ashe Co., NC.

Amanda Dollar and William Davis Lyall

John Dula Dollar is my great great grandfather.  My great grandmother probably didn’t know her father terribly well.  When she was a baby, her mother died a few months after her birth, and her father left his three oldest children with his father and step mother while he worked.  A few years later, he married Cleopatra Gentry and took the two oldest children to live with him, leaving my great grandmother to live with her grandparents.    John had three children with his first wife, Buena Vista Bailey and seven children with his second wife.  I know that during his lifetime, he worked in a lumber mill with his father and brother, probably worked as a miner in Colorado (he is recorded there in 1920 with his family) and was also known as a shoemaker, carpenter, and store operator.  I suppose he did just about anything to support his large family.

Emeline Caroline married a man, Caleb Wills Noland who lived nearby on 27 Oct 1881 in Johnson Co., TN when she was 15 years old.  She and her husband had nine known children and to this day, I know very little about some of her children.  She was the longest lived of the Dollar siblings living to almost 89 years old.  During her lifetime, she can be found in Tennessee, McDowell Co., WV, Wise Co., VA and she dies in Letcher Co., KY.  It is no wonder that her family has been hard to piece together.

John Dula Dollar family - abt 1895

The youngest of the Dollar siblings is Roby Smith Dollar.  Roby also married a local neighbor woman named Sarah Margaret Simmons.  The Dollars and Simmons family can be found close together in the census records.  Only Roby stayed in the Johnson Co., TN area for the remainder of his life.  Roby primarily worked as a lumberman and carpenter.  There are parts of the Wesley Methodist Church in Shingletown that he built and are still in evidence today.  He and his wife Sarah aka Maggie had 10 daughters.  All lived to be old women.  He used say that he would never be poor because he had his “10 Dollars!”  On 19 Feb 1912, Maggie died of pneumonia leaving Roby with his 10 daughters and the youngest was only 6 months old.  Life took most of Roby’s daughters away through marriage, work and different opportunities.   His daughter Eva lived with him for a time because she herself was disabled and had a difficult time with sight.  She is buried next to him at the Mountain View Cemetery in Mountain City, TN.  One of his daughters came back home with her husband and stayed to take care of her father and she lived to be almost 100 years old. 

Roby Dollar family in 1905

I have often wondered if Elizabeth Pennington was sickly during her life.  It is odd in that era to have only four children and spaced so far apart in age.   I know that she moved with her husband over to Laurel Bloomery but probably died within a few years after the move.  She was probably around my age of 45 when she died.  The path my Dollars took over to Laurel Bloomery was because of the Pennington family.  Elizabeth Pennington’s uncle, Andrew Pennington, lived over in Laurel Bloomery…specifically in Shingletown.  At the time, Alexander Monroe Dollar, found a better way to support his family by working as a lumberman – so they moved over the mountain to Tennessee.   The Dollars and Penningtons came from Ashe Co., NC – but my particular branch through my great grandmother came out of little house in a holler in LaurelBloomery.