Hello James,

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I was speaking to you earlier on the Daniel message board. I then realized that you & I have communicated before, in December 2019, on Ancestry. I just reread your message from back then. At the time, you said you had yet to connect John to William Mack, but then later you referred to William as "John's bro." I don't think that I caught that the first time that I read it because of what you said next, which caught my eye--that William Mack was a co-owner of Meltons Mill. I have often wondered if William's wife, Eliza Ann Melton, was Phillip Melton's daughter. The DNA matches suggest that she could be, & the fact that she & William named their second son Phillip also suggests that. However, almost no one has her listed as his daughter, in fact I think I was the first one on Ancestry to link them together. Not to mention that a descendent of their daughter, Avis Caroline, said it was passed down that William & Eliza lived in far eastern Tennessee, near Iron Mountain, until after their second daughter, Lucinda Jane, was born. That piece of information sort of threw a monkey wrench in trying to tie Eliza to Phillip & William to Joseph Daniel's family. It has also been passed down that Eliza was at least partially Native American. I don't know anything about her mother, so that's a possibility...not to mention that my mother knew Eliza & William's granddaughter (my mother's grandmother), & my mother always thought her grandmother was a full-blooded native, partly because of how she looked & acted, but also because she mentioned being native to my mom & said that she had turned down land in Oklahoma because she wanted to stay in Missouri.

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As for Elizabeth Green, who was Phillip Melton's wife when he died, I don't believe that she was the mother of his children. They had only been married for about 10 years at the time of his death.

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The reason that I spelled Joseph's nickname as possibly "Joab" is because that is how it's spelled in a letter that Joseph & Elizabeth's son, William, wrote when trying to help Elizabeth get her widow's pension. I wasn't sure if this was William Mack or the older William, because supposedly the older William was already dead by the time the letter was written (1853). And, the son who wrote the letter lived in Lawrence County, TN. On the 1850 census, William Mack is the only William Daniel that I see in Lawrence County.

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What are you looking for as proof of ancestry for descendants of this line? As I mentioned when I replied to your message on the message board, I have my DNA test at Ancestry, GEDmatch & Family Tree DNA.?

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My Ancestry profile is:

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On WikiTree, I am listed as a descendent of William Mack. My GEDmatch number can be found there, also.

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By the way, I saw from your message on Ancestry that your middle initial is "M." Is James M. Daniel a family name that's been passed down? William & Eliza's first son's name was James M., & I believe that John also named one of his sons James M (James Madison).?

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