As related last week, the Westmorelands were among the earliest settlers of the Fayette County area, arriving in the 1820s and settling near what is now County Line Christian Church.

Most of us are taught to tell the truth at a very young age. Unfortunately, the lesson doesn’t stick until much later, if ever.

Dixie Divas #97

People sometimes ask me what’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten. There are lots of strong candidates.

Ever a reader of local journalism when we travel, I clipped a small op-ed piece I found in the Washington Post last month. The headline read, “It’s a Life, Not a Feel-Good Moment.”

As I watched television news Sunday afternoon, networks carried footage of the current President Bush and his wife leaving church, as well as the former President Bush and his wife. What occurred to me as I watched was that the former president was not wearing a coat and tie, but some crew neck knit shirt. At least that’s what it looked like to me a few hundred miles away.

Continuing with our series on the Tidwell family of Fayette, this week we add the collateral family of Westmoreland, descendants of William Westmoreland of Virginia. Much of the information in this series was taken from the book, “McCall-Tidwell and Allied Families,” written by Ettie Tidwell McCall of Atlanta in 1931. Several members of the Westmoreland family married Tidwells.

The Peachtree City Police Department announced last week that officers had arrested a man in his 40s for allegedly, among other charges, attempting to meet a girl he believed to be 13 years old, for immoral purposes. It was the 14th such arrest by the department in 18 months.

I’ve tried to save money all of my life, and to date I’m ashamed to say I’ve utterly and completely failed. Not that I haven’t tried, though. Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve clipped coupons, which I forget about, leave on the kitchen table, and go grocery shopping without. The coupons finally end up in the trashcan long after they expire. I’ll go behind The Boy and cut off light switches in an effort to save energy – only to leave the hall light on at night because, well, some big fireman in our house is a little afraid of the dark. But now with The Boy off at school, it’s more important than ever for us to save money.

Dear Mary and Rainer,

Where has the time gone? I was going to write you a nice long letter at Christmas, then again at New Year’s, and here January is almost gone. Sometimes I worry whether you feel neglected, but I do know how busy you are, especially during the holidays. Time just got away from us too.

Last week in my address to the Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Celebration, I made a few points that warrant a re-run (It has undergone minor revision),

Opinions about local stuff, not necessarily in order of importance:

Sheriff versus County Commission chairman on accounting for federally-dispensed drug forfeiture money: Gentlemen, gentlemen, please.

Recently, courts were back in the news.

No, it wasn’t a case of “activist judges” legislating their beliefs over the beliefs of others. In fact, the courts were absolutely in the right in their decisions, as far as I could see in the details that were included in the two news stories. The real stories were either the cases themselves or what happened after the decision was handed down.

Several years ago, in the early days of my adult life, I was home visiting from Indianapolis, where I had a sports marketing job.

You Democrats in the Alito hearings remind me of the O.J. Simpson trial. Day after grueling day, all of America was glued to the TV to witness the mounds of incriminating evidence against O.J. Simpson. Everyone in the court room knew without a doubt that he was 100 percent guilty, but the total disrespect of law and evidence made no difference.

Please allow me the privilege of bragging for a few moments. I know that it is often considered unseemly and crass to brag but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m not bragging about myself or my church or members of my immediate family this time, but I am going to express my extreme pride in a 19-year-old young man that I have known for well over 10 years.

It’s not fair, I tell you, it’s just not fair. No matter what we do, we can’t change it. Oh, I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried. But no amount of ranting or raving has worked. When I found out, I stomped around the house for days — didn’t change a darn thing, just scared the cats. Despite all my efforts to stop it, they went ahead and did it anyway. Why didn’t they just leave things alone? Right when we were getting use to the old ones, they go and change, messing everything up.

There were several marriages between the Tidwell and Westmoreland families but we’ll only discuss one this week; the marriage of William de Graffenried Tidwell to Angelina Westmoreland. Much of the information on this family is taken from the book, “McCall-Tidwell and Allied Families” written by Ettie Tidwell McCall of Atlanta in 1931. William de Graffenried Tidwell was Mrs. McCall’s grandfather.

This column takes place between the hours of 1 and 2 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 13.

Cue the flashing numbers and the “beep, beep, beep” sound effects.

Well, maybe I’m not the best example. I don’t have much patience for ceremony or parades, and political posturing triggers my gag reflex.

Mama doesn’t want anyone to call me sexy.

Not that anyone wants to call me “sexy” but just in case.

“I think it would degrade you,” she declared suddenly. I could tell by her tone that she had put a great deal of thought into the matter. It seems to me that she would have more important things to worry about like how much food she can possibly get Dixie Dew to eat in one day.

Take the traditional sitcom approach to baby-birthing.

Please.

Daughter delightedly announces to her mom that she is going to make her a grandmother.

This past Monday I was honored as the principal speaker at the Martin Luther King Jr. Birthday Celebration co-sponsored by the Fayette Chapter of the NAACP and the Fayette County School System.

I feel like my body has gotten totally out of shape, so after I got my doctor's permission to join a fitness club and start exercising I decided to take an aerobics class for seniors. I bent, twisted, gyrated, jumped up and down, and perspired for an hour. But, by the time I got my leotards on, the class was over.

A number of churches have been going through what some are calling the “worship wars,” which is a conflict between those who favor hymns and those who lean more toward the praise choruses. Churches even have split over the issue while others have traditional services alongside contemporay services. Some have blended their worship using both hymns and choruses. All this reminds me of a couple of stories sent to me by Father Rick Hatfield of Florida:

Like most kids, growing up we had to do a lot of listening. Some of us did it better than the others. Mom used to say we needed to listen twice as much as we talked. “That’s why God gave you two ears and one mouth. You can’t learn anything if you’re talking.”

Last week we left off with the children of William Tidwell who married Mary Amelia Jones and came to the Coweta-Meriwether area. This week we’ll discuss his brother, Benjamin, from whom he was never separated after the two were orphaned in 1783. Much of the information on this family is taken from the book, “McCall-Tidwell and Allied Families” written by Ettie Tidwell McCall of Atlanta in 1931. Some is from my own research.

If you thought 2006 might give us a break from columns about my never-ending searches for lost objects, you thought wrong.

Come closer and gather around my crystal ball. Pay no attention to that orange, clearance price tag on the base or that smudge around the top. I was eating Cool Ranch Doritos earlier.

The U.S. House version of an immigration bill is mean-spirited, according to the editors of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, because it makes being in the U.S. illegally a felony. Well, wait until they hear my idea.

A friend of mine, who is a successful television writer, called one day about a writing project we were working on together.