Ezell

I'm not sure I had ever heard the word Ezell before about 10 years ago. Since then I have noticed it on trucks from Ezell Trucking, a Church of Christ school in Nashville and restaurants in many different places.

I was trying to locate a marriage record for my Great Great Great Grandmother on my father's side of the family, Holly Blanchard was born May 31, 1797 in Duplin County North Carolina and died October 1884 in Taylor County Florida. She was listed in the Andrew Jackson Green family bible.

I traced her from Taylor County Florida in the 1880 census to Stewart County Georgia in the 1850 one. I then found her on the 1840 census in Duplin County North Carolina and figured she had married there.

I posted a query on a Duplin County genealogy board and a couple months later got an email from Thelma Ezell Peters in Volant, Pennsylvania. Thelma had been researching her Ezell family for twenty years and was looking for the children of Henry Ezell who lived in Duplin County. She knew there was a daughter named Holly and wrote to me sending a marriage record for Holly Ezell and Benjamin Blanchard.

We weren't sure if this was my Holly until she gave me the names of her siblings and I realized her sister Mary who married a Sutton and brother Alexander were the same ones who lived next to my Holly in both Georgia and Florida. So we were certain my Holly was one of the children of Henry Ezell and since I had documentation of the siblings, I had helped Thelma find two more of Henry's children.

Since then I have located descendants of both Mary and Alexander. One interesting meeting was in July 2008 when I was hosting a reunion for my Mother's Fulford family in Cortez Florida. I had found some Ezells who moved there from Taylor County around 1900 but had never found any of their descendants.

So who showed up at the Cortez reunion but Roy Ezell who was born and raised in Cortez. He read about the reunion in the local newspaper and decided to come by and see who he knew.

Roy Ezell had grown up near my Dad's cousin Woodrow Green and his sons but never knew he was related to them. Woodrow's wife Doris had done genealogy research on both her family and Woodrow's but never found the Ezell connection.

I had my laptop with me so I was able to show Roy his ancestor, Alexander Ezell and how he and the Green family was related.