The Quest II

The Quest II is an extended edition of the author's previous publication, The Quest. Quest II includes family sketches and detailed ancestral lineages of Benjamin Daily, John Daily, Martha Malinda Daily, and her husband, Edmund Sylvester Hardin, all who lived in Rutherford County, North Carolina, from the 1790s up until the early 1920s. The authors also present additional pictures and provide revealing stories and illustrations that are sure to please readers who will enjoy taking a trip back through time along the back roads of western North Carolina. Join this family of three contemporary genealogy researchers on their hunt across creeks and rivers, down railroad tracks, and over the hills and hollows of the western Piedmont in an effort to resurrect over 200 years of the past. Travel with them as they seek to find their ancestor's 19th century farm and 'Big House,' and 18th century log home and long-lost family graveyard. It is a journey filled with cheerful surprises, new acquaintances, startling revelations, and many mournful losses, but it is also a journey to understanding and of sincere reverence and respect for our ancestors and their lost way of life. The Quest II: For over 200 years the old Benjamin Daily family graveyard has sat serenely in the pastoral countryside of Ellenboro, North Carolina, on what used to be a Cherokee Indian village. And for nearly 100 years the aged graveyard, cloaked and hidden by tall grasses and ferns, has been lost, abandoned, and all but forgotten. Similarly, the location of Martha Malinda Daily and her husband Edmund Sylvester Hardin's farmhouse, built by him in the late 1800s and called the 'Big House,' was yet another unsolved mystery. Their house and farmland, according to Hardin/Daily family oral history, was said to have been situated somewhere near the Second Broad River in the Pea Ridge Road vicinity of Rutherford County, North Carolina. Was it also lost to posterity?For Dennis C. Martin and his two sisters, Cynthia Y. Whited and Tonya M. Rogers, the authors of the soon to be published genealogy book This Too Shall Pass, finding the Old Daily Graveyard and the log home built by their third great-grandfather Benjamin Daily in the 1790s, and the 'Big House' built in the 1890s by their great-grandfather Edmund Sylvester Hardin, became a personal quest. These were the three Holy Grails of their family ancestry, and they sought to find that which might be lost, and that which might possibly still exist. And so, armed with family stories, the writings of past genealogists, tax maps, modern satellite maps, and all that they had gleaned from the internet, the trio began their search, their quest, during the spring of 2013. This is the story of their Rutherford County, North Carolina, red-dirt road of discovery, a journey that includes many warm recollections and nostalgic photographs, and a journey that takes us all back to a slower and simpler time.