My March through the FamilySearch Family Tree: Day 14 (Mary Edna "Edney" Eidson)

Although all of my Relatives at RootsTech matches were through Jane Belle Bodie, those that weren't through her siblings were almost all through her father, Nathan A. Bodie, Jr. So this means that it would be easier to work through Jane's mother's family first, that of Mary Edna "Edney" Eidson.

Mary Edna "Edney" Eidson: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LZKN-X6G

The entry for her in the Family Tree has her with 11 children, but they aren't an exact match to the 11 that I have in my own files. The Family Tree has the following children for Mary Edna (among others):

Rupel and James Russell

Amorilla and Amanda

This is my first time in encountering a "Rupel", and based on where "he" falls, it occurs to me that someone has misinterpreted the long "s" of "Russell" as a "p". So I merged those 2 together.

I previously mentioned John Bennett Boddie as having researched these families, and in his 1938 book Seventeeth Century Isle of Wight County Virginia, he devotes Chapter XIX to "The Boddie-Bodie Family in South Carolina". On pages 387-389, he lists the children of Nathan A. Bodie, Jr., including my great-grandmother Jane. (He is unsure as to exactly which children belong to which of Nathan's wives.) In his list, he has "Manda, m. Willis Holmes" (no birth year given) and "Amorilla" (born 1839). 

When I saw this many years ago, I was immediately struck by the oddity of the name Amorilla. Why would anyone in 1840s South Carolina name a child something almost exactly like the Spanish word for yellow? Unfortunately, John Bennett Boddie did not provide sources for his work on this family, so I examined the 1850 census for the Nathan Bodie family. Not only did I see Russell using the long "s" (which to an untrained eye, does very much look like a "p"), but also I saw Amanda, whose name might be misread as Amorilla. John Bennett Boddie had taken one girl and turned her into two. There was just Amanda. So I merged those together.

Removing these two duplicates got me down to 9 children. The other 2, which I then added, were unnamed males who appear in the tick marks for earlier censuses but who must have died prior to 1840 or 1850. I added them in. This helps to eliminate warnings from the Family Tree that there may be missing children.