One of the most useful tools in this website will be the tags that are found on the bottom of each post.
This image, for instance, contains names of each person of significance who is mentioned in the article. You can click on any tag you see at the bottom of a post, and it will take you to a page of every post in which that person’s name appears. For now, as the site is young, there is not a lot of information about any one person, but over time there will be much more.
Tags can contain names of events or other topics as well. Those tags work the same way as names.
For tags to be the most useful, it was necessary for me to choose one name per person. For women I have chosen to use their maiden names. I have also had to settle on one spelling. My Aunt Sally, for instance, regularly interchanged the spelling of her own name from Sallie to Sally. It was Sallie more in her younger years, and Sally more later. I used “Sally Payne.”
Usually if a person goes by a nickname most of the time, it is because there is another person with their same given name. Aunt Doll’s son, Bill Breeding, for example. Bill had a cousin in Knoxville, also named Bill Breeding, who often visited and was mentioned in The Progress Lone Mountain social column. Since everyone I knew always called the first Bill Breeding “Eli,” I elected to label his tag “Eli Breeding.”
For my grandmother, A Payne, I elected to use her full maiden name, “Sallie A.M. “A” Jennings, ” as her name is rather unusual. For her sister-in-law and best friend, Mattie Payne, whom I always knew as “Aunt Matt Fate,” I used her maiden name, Mattie Livesay.
There is no exact science to my method, but the important thing is that you figure out the name I used for anyone you want to look up. Then use that tag for that person to find all the information that pertains to them, regardless of what their name was at any point in time.
~Amy Payne Potts
