Two Degrees of Separation - SNGF

Today Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun in his Genea-Musings blog has a fun feature asking us to report on our family link's to the past. The requirement is:

Using your ancestral lines, how far back in time can you go with two degrees of separation?  That means "you knew an ancestor, who knew another ancestor."  When was that second ancestor born?

My life overlapped that of one of my great grandparents on my mother's side. Effie (Irion) Bell (1860-1948) did not die until I was four. I don't clearly remember her, but my older sister knew her well. Effie grew up near all four of her grandparents and knew them well. The lives of her two maternal great grandmothers overlapped her own. They were Jemima (Hutchings/Hutchinson) Irion (1779-1868) and Mary Ann "Polly" (Cooper) Trotter (1776-1867). It is likely she knew them both at least a little. In this line my two degrees of separation link me to women born in 1776 and 1779, back to the time of the American Revolution.

Effie (Irion) Bell

I am particularly interested in this line because of a third degree of separation. I vaguely knew my great grandmother, Effie (Irion) Bell. My sister knew her well and heard the family stories from her.  Effie grew up close to her grandmother, Mary (Trotter) Irion (1811-1900). Mary was a great storyteller and along with her sister Phoebe (Trotter) Willey (1818-1906) passed on the stories they learned from their paternal grandmother. "Mad Anne" Bailey was a locally famous woman of the frontier around present day Charleston, West Virginia. Anne (Hennis) Trotter Bailey (ca. 1742-1825), an English immigrant, lived with her son's family in Gallia County, Ohio, in her later days and was close to her granddaughters passing down her stories to them. I've long felt that the connection truly goes back to her through the lives and stories of her descendants. See the sidebar for a link to my page on her.