Monday, February 06, 2006

50 years since a significant Bodie publication

It has been more than a year since I last updated my genealogical research site. Today, I noticed that it was 50 years ago (1956) that Eytive Long Evans published A Documented History of the Long Family, 1578-1956. That particular book was one of the first books that got me started on working on the Bodie family line. Evans especially covers them on pages 230 through 249. She references another source I have frequently used regarding the family: John Bennett Boddie's Seventeenth Century Isle of Wight County, Virginia, which was published in 1938. So far as I'm aware, the two books constitute the only significant published genealogies of the South Carolina branch of the Boddie/Bodie families.

J.B. Boddie refers, on page 389 of his book, to Jane (born 1845), who married Wyley Long. Evans, on page 237, also refers to Jane in a list of the children of Nathan Bodie and Mary Edna Eidson.

It is this same Jane Bodie who appears on my grandfather's SS-5 as his mother ("Janie Belle Body"), and who, according to members of my family still living at the time I began working on genealogical research, was the wife first of Wiley (Wyley, Wylie) Long, then Edmund (Edmond) Manley Martin, and then John C. Farmer. The descendants of Jane by her first two husbands (she had no children by Farmer, who she married much later in life), together with the descendants of Edmund Martin by his wife, often held joint reunions near Lake Greenwood in upstate South Carolina at least until the late 1950s.

Perhaps someday, when my work on this line is complete and is published, it will be cause for a new reunion.