Emma Wyatt can be shown to be the daughter of Francis Withington Herring and Emma Alice Johnson from her presence in her parents household in the 1900 Census, from her obituary and her father’s obituary and from the fact that her widowed mother lived with her in the 1930 Census.

Emma Wyatt Herring (Granny) is the person who links the Lawthers to the Herring family and through the wives of certain Herring ancestors to the Johnson, Lee, Highsmith, Bass, Carroll, Fennell, Lamb and David lines -- and others yet to be discovered or explored. All of these connected families are interesting and their story is told later.

But the Herring family, too, is quite a noteworthy and interesting family. We came to know this family while browsing the books available in the Local History Room of the New Hanover County Library (NHCL) which has absolutely the best genealogy collection of any community library we have ever been in (and in doing genealogy on the Mertz and Lawther families, we have been in quite a few). Mary knew her grandmother as Emma Wyatt Herring and knew she had been born in Sampson County and she also remembered that Emma Wyatt’s parents were, she thought, Francis Withington Herring and Emma Alice Johnson.

So when we found the book “Herring Highlights” about some local Herrings who descended from a John Herring who came to Virginia from England in about 1640, it seemed worth a closer look. The book listed many, many descendant branches of this family, some more completely than others. It happened to show a Frank Herring who married an Emma Johnson but it did not place them geographically, provide any dates of any kind to associate with this couple (birth or death dates, marriage date) and no further information was shown for the descendants of this couple -- nothing to really tie them into people Mary actually remembered, but their names and the fact of their marriage made a direct hit with information Mary had remembered about her ancestors. The Herring book was the first real break we got in researching Mary's family.

The Herring book identified George W Herring and Mary Carroll as the parents of Frank and it identified Amos Herring and Mary Jane Fennell as the parents of George W. And the line was complete back six more generations to the aforementioned John Herring. In addition, it all seemed quite well researched and documented (sometimes publications of this type contain so many errors they are not worth the paper they’re printed on.)

This had the potential to be a wonderful find, but as Mary pointed out to me at the time, we still didn't have any hard evidence (other than Mary's recollections) to link Emma Wyatt Herring directly to these people. So we first set out to make that case. The 1880 Census, which was the easiest Census to get access to at that time, shows F W Herring and wife Emma A married and living in Sampson County. Living with them was a son Luvy (who we think was to die young) and someone identified as "cook" Mary A Johnson (hints of the Johnson connection).

There are no records from the 1890 Census as the whole thing was consumed by a fire in Washington, DC. But, the final linchpin to tie everything together is the 1900 Census, where we find Frank W Herring living in Sampson County with wife Emma A and three children including daughter Emma W, which proved Mary's original recollections accurate as to the names of Emma Wyatt’s parents and also was significant because Francis must have used the name Frank, which is the way he had been named in the Herring book.

Using the Herring book, then, as a guide, we were able to use Census data, wills and occasional other sources to prove it right as to Emma Wyatt’s forbears from the time they showed up in Sampson County, five generations previous.

Emma was named for her mother, Emma Alice Johnson, but the source of the name Wyatt, the name she more often went by, has eluded detection. Often, a person“s middle name is a surname of a previous maternal line, but that is not the case with Emma Wyatt. Wyatt is a name that has been carried forward to her descendants, I wish I knew its origins.

On 6 Dec 1956, Wyatt Herring Lawther appeared at court with a lawyer, with T A Lawther Jr. and with D C North Jr. all of whom attested that the unwitnessed will that Wyatt presented was that of T A Lawther. The will was quite simple and consisted of three sentences: he left everything to Wyatt, if she predeceased him then to his two sons, Wyatt was to be Executor. The will was accepted and the estate went to Wyatt.

Her obituary says she was born in Sampson Co, daughter of Frank W and Emma Johnson Herring. It says she was 79 b.8/23/1882, and she died Saturday 27 May 1961 in a local nursing home after a long illness.

I sometimes call Pappy TA II as he, his father and his son all had the same name. I don't know if he ever was known as Jr. but by the time his father had died and his son was born, he most certainly was Sr. Pappy lived his entire life in Wilmington, NC where, like his father and grandfather before him, he was a railroad engineer. His obituary says he was a retired ACL engineer, having served in that capacity 53 years.