I guess this as vanilla-flavored as it gets. My family is from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Bavaria (modern Germany), with a dash of Cherokee thrown in to keep it from being excessively bland.

My family has been in the South for quite a long time, at least since the late 18th century, some branches even longer. So far, this is the story as I have discovered it. I have had great success with some lines, but have hit a brick wall two centuries back on the Hugheys. I suspect this is due to a change in spelling (very common) and am therefore starting to look into known variants such as Howie, Huie, Haughey, Hoghey, Huey, etc.

My father was the first generation of born-and-bred urban Hughey, his own father, Chester L. Hughey, having moved to Memphis from the family farm in Mississippi in the 1930s, learned his trade as boilermaker and married an orphaned young lady named Polly Stevens. Chester's father, James Nall Hughey, was therefore the last of the farmer Hugheys in my direct line, though many other Hugheys are still on the land in Northern Mississippi. James Nall's wife, Lula Hamm, wasn't the first Hamm to enter the Hughey clan: Hamms (also spelled with one 'm') had been marrying into their friends' family for years. (The Hamms had come to the Colonies from Bavaria circa 1740.) James Nall's father, James Harris Hughey, was the first to be born in Mississippi, the family having migrated from North Carolina around 1850. Why Samuel Hughey and his wife Sarah Jane Eason of Anson Co., NC, took their family from the Carolinas I may never know. They seem to have had a good life there and were prominent members of the community, one Hughey having been the first sheriff of his county. Perhaps Mississippi, having become a state just a generation earlier, offered new opportunities for young farmers. Whatever their motivations, by the time their son James Harris Hughey (whose middle name was his maternal grandfather's first name and before that the surname of a family close to the Easons) married Ruth Emma Abernathy, the family was firmly rooted in northern Mississippi.

My mother's people, the Gettings (originally Gittings and also seen as Gittins, spellings that persist in many other lines) arrived in the Colonies a century before we broke away from Britain. For the first century they were content to stay in Maryland, where they had first settled, but William Gittings took his family south to Kentucky not long after the Revolution. My own direct family didn't stay there long, though many other Gettings still live there. My Gettings soon migrated to the west, to Illinois, where to this day their small town is still called Gittings Mound. My great-grandfather, Enos Hardy Gettings, took his own family back south, to the Missouri boothill around Chaffee in the opening years of the last century. His son, Louie Arthur, went still further south and settled his family in Memphis, where his daughter met my father around 1960.