FREQUENT MOVEMENTS COMPLICATE RESEARCH One of the things that frequently complicated family research in southeast Kentucky is that families sometimes moved around between the three neighboring states, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. Anderson Blanton's early life has several such movements. His father James Blanton was born sometime before 1778 in Virginia. He was one of the early settlers in these mountains and lived for several years in what was then Knox County but became Harlan in 1819. It was during the stay in Kentucky that Anderson was born, about 1813. Not long afterwards, James moved his family to Monroe County, Tenn. It was apparently there that Anderson grew up and met and married his wife, Mary. Mary, the daughter of George Long, was born about 1811 in North Carolina. She and Anderson died the same year, 1876, here in Harlan County. Their oldest son, Lewis, was born in Monroe County, Tenn., about 1835, and the next child, George, was born about 1837 here in Kentucky so the move was made about 1836. The oldest son, Lewis H. Blanton, born about 1835, married William and Elizabeth Osborne Helton's daughter Barbara in 1853. By the 1870 census, they had Jemima `Mima,' born about 1856; Jesse, born Aug. 17, 1859; Silas, born about 1865; Elizabeth, born about 1866; and John G., born about 1869. His brother George E. Blanton, born about 1837, after the move back to Kentucky, married, in 1857, Mary E. Lewis, daughter of John and Delia Noe Lewis. Their household is listed in the 1860 census with one child, Elizabeth, born about 1859. Silas W. Blanton was born about 1839 and died by June of 1866 when his widow, Mary, was appointed administrator of his estate. Mary, whome he had married in 1861, was the daughter of Andrew and Happy Howard Hensley. Martha Blanton, Anderson and Mary's only daughter, was born about 1841. In 1857, she married Nathan Harris Noe. Nathan, the son of John and Susan Harris Noe, was born April 5, 1834, in Harlan, and died in 1920. Martha's brother John was born about a year later. He has not been located after the 1860 census when he was still at home with his parents. James Blanton was born about 1845. He served for the Union in the Civil War. Shortly after the war, in 1866, he married Sarah, daughter of John H. and Mary Saylor Brock. James died by 1898. He and Sarah are listed in 1870 with two sons, Sherman and John. Hiram Blanton was born about 1847. In 1875, he married Susan, daughter of William and Nancy Slusher Blanton. Susan was the widow of Wilkerson Hensley whom she had married in 1869. Martin Blanton was born about 1849 and, in 1869, he married Adron Nolan's widow, Alabama. Alabama, born about 1845, was the daughter of Hezekiah and Elizabeth Coldiron Jennings. In 1861, she had married Nolan who was killed during the Civil War. Martin and Alabama are listed in the 1870 census with her two children by Adron, Mary, born about 1862, and Pearl, born about 1864, and with their daughter, Martha Alice, born in February of 1870. The youngest of the family, Charles M. Blanton was born about 1856.