If you live in Cherokee County, chances are Betty Green is related to you somehow. And she's written a two-volume, 1,445-page family history book to prove it.

"I've really been working on this for 40 years," Green said. "When I was 12, my grandmother passed away and I realized I hardly knew her. I also hardly knew the people who were coming around at the time. I was too young to take notes or remember names, but I remembered the stories and the faces. I started writing this book because I wanted to know who I was and where I came from. I wanted to know more about my family."

The result of all this work was "The Dixon/Dickson Families and Their Ancestry," published last year by Southern Historical Press in Greenville. A copy of the two volumes has been donated to the Cherokee County Public Library.

"I wanted to give a copy to this library for lots of reasons," Green said. "First of all, they have a dedicated genealogy room. Secondly, many of my ancestors and their children all lived in and around Cherokee County. Through my research I've found that the Dixon/Dickson line has crossed into many prominent Gaffney families. There are over 45,000 names indexed including: Orchard, Matthews, Schneider/Snyder, Aust, Biwighaus, Benzien, Fogle, Weisner, Fischer, Vance, Ormsby, Pfhol, Mickey, Siewers, Spach, Miksch/Micks, Mease, Betty Green worked for almost 40 years doing researching for the two-volume history of the Dixon/Dickson family. The book indexes more than 40,000 names and a copy has been donated to the Cherokee County Public Library. Reichel, Held, Poteet/Poteat, Smalley/Smawley, Smiley, Green, Gurley, Biggerstaff, Foster, Guy, Hill, Nichols/Nicholls, Sanders, Gresham, Waddell, Vaughn, Toney, Turner, Trammel/Trammell, Wilson, McAbee, Humphries, Satterfield, Lovelace, Jones, Robbins, Hoy, Parks, Mangum, Scruggs, Seay, Horn, Parris, Turner, Haynes, Cuthbertson, Ellington, Williard/Willard, Landis and many more."

Although Green now lives in Satellite Beach, Fla., she grew up near Startex and is quite familiar with Gaffney. The book is available from the publisher for $200 or from Green herself at a discounted price. For more information, she can be contacted via e-mail at bgreen700@aol.com.

"The hardest part of the project was knowing when to stop," Green said. "I had many more families I could have written more about and some families where I wasn't happy with having no clear answers. I could have probably written four volumes!"

But, she hopes the two will accomplish her goal.

"The aim in donating these books and publishing them in the first place was to hopefully inspire someone in the younger generation to keep the records going," Green concluded. "If we don't know where we've come from, it's hard to know where we can go."