What happens when researchers of printed genealogies come to different conclusions about ambiguous information? That was my question when considering the list of Adam Broyles' children in his 1782 will, compared to the notes provided in the works of researcher Arthur Leslie Keith. It's time to see if we can reconcile some of those genealogical differences. Now that I've received a copy of an updated Broyles family genealogy—Cathi Clore Frost's The Broyles Family, the First Four Generations, published by the Germanna Foundation—one of my first goals is to compare notes on the barely legible married names of two of Adam Broyles' daughters in the Keith manuscript.
Though Adam's daughter Anne was clearly listed in Adam's own will by her married name, Brown, and daughter Mima had not yet married, the two other Broyles daughters' situations were not as clear. Mary, the youngest, was not married at the time her father's will was drawn up in the frontier region soon to be known as Washington County, Tennessee. The entry indicating her married name in the Keith manuscript was overwritten—at least I was unable to read it—hence my eagerness to see what Cathi Clore Frost might have concluded from her own research.
As for the one remaining daughter, even her first name was a question in my mind. From her father's will, I read something like "Mille" but I have seen others read it as Milla. To complicate matters, this daughter was married at the time of her father's will, but the name was not entirely clear. It looked like Panther to me, but it could as easily have been Parther.
As it turns out, Adam's daughter Mille may have gone by several versions of her given name—a number only to be exceeded by the amount of guesses given on her married surname. Tomorrow, we'll review the possibilities, especially focusing on the many Frost footnotes on this one daughter of Adam Broyles, and see if there is any way to align any of those options with actual documentation.
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