Glenda - while searching for my own Bettis ancestors I accidentally bumped into yours. You might want to check out an interesting Web page at http://members.aol.com/genny1/tidbit1.html. It's a set of abstracts of 90 probate documents from Franklin County, NC, dating from 1790 -1803. One of them is the will of James Bettis, dividing his estate between his sons William and Wyatt and his daughter Elizabeth Bettis Harris and Sarah Bettis Wiggins.

Yours Bettises and mine must have been closely related, because they were hanging around with a lot of people with the same names. My gggg-grandfather Elijah (or Elisha?) Bettis, living two counties away in Moore County, married an Amey Overton and had a son named Ransom Sutherland Bettis. The Franklin County William Bettis appears together with a "Ransom Southerland" in connection with the estate of a John Clayton. There is also a family of Overtons in Franklin County. All of them seem to have migrated west to TN and MO around 1800.

There is something about this group of people that I don't quite grasp. The overlap between their list of names and other lists is intriguing, and I wish I could find out more.