HilleBooks

In 1975, I was playing music with the band Night Life. The pianist, Bob Smith, had been doing some genealogy on his family. Since he lived in Winston-Salem and I lived in Raleigh, he asked me if I would go to the NC State Archives and do some research for him. Remember, this was before computers. I had no idea what he wanted me to do or how to do it. But, he gave me the information to do what he requested.

I mentioned to my father what I was going to do and he said, "While you're down there, would you look to see if you can find my great grandfather Levi McDowell in the records." Well, now I was really lost but I went to the archives anyway. The man behind the counter George Stephenson, now deceased, was dressed in coat and tie, very formal in my opinion. He helped me find the information for Bob and then I asked him what to do about Levi McDowell. I knew he was born about 1832 in Randolph County, NC. So, I filled out the appropriate "call slip" and he brought out the original 1850 census book for Randolph County, NC. It was about 2 inches thick and maybe 18 inches wide and 2 feet tall. I had to run my finger down the pages reading as I went. I finally found Levi McDowell listed with his mother Tilathy McDowell and other siblings. There was no father listed; of course, the 1850 census gives no relationships anyway. George used some device and made me a copy of the page to take home to dad.

That was the beginning of my genealogy research. Bob was happy; my dad was happy. We didn't know who the father of Levi McDowell was. After getting really hooked and going to the archives late in the afternoon after teaching a full day at Enloe High School, I found these things called microfiche. Someone had indexed all the marriages in North Carolina onto microfiche and the State Archives had a microfiche reader. Also, somewhere in those first months, dad and I ran into a contact in Randolph County who said she had old papers that said that Riley Hill's sister Tilathy had married a McDowell. Ah ha! So now I used the microfiche that was indexed by females and looked up Tilathy Hill and a guessed date of a marriage. Sure enough, John McDowell married Tilathy Hill here in Wake County, NC on 6 August 1819. Getting them from Wake County to Randolph County became another hurdle.

For some unknown reason, I got hooked on the Hill family and ever since 1975, I have researching their families almost exclusively. At the time of this writing, that's almost 50 years of researching the Hill families. You'll find an explanation of the research in the introduction to each of my published eBooks. My brother Keith and I decided we would do self-publishing through Amazon.com as opposed to publishing, printing, and binding hard copies of books with no idea who or how many people might want to buy them. I'm closing out the year 2024 with 13 completed Hill eBooks and a fourteenth one well on the way. I have perhaps another half dozen where I've done the major, initial research and just need to pull it together to publish perhaps another six books before I get too old.

I hope that you find this site useful and full of knowledge that answers all your questions about selected Hill families. Happy researching!