My great grandfather William Elijay Gilmer was half Cherokee. My great great grandmother was Ellen Dodson, a full blood Cherokee from Gilmer County GA. She named her son Elijay which is a Cherokee name for "newly plowed ground".

As far as family reserchers have determine, they cannot find relationship between my ancestors in Jasper County GA and Gov. George R. Gilmer. I feel like there is but I cannot document it. It is just too much of a coincendence for two surnames living that close to each other and were not related in some way, especially in the late 1700s when everyone with the same surname were related. It is similar to Coffee in 1730 Virginia. There were only three Coffees known to arrive in American colony by 1730 from Liverpool, England, and my ancestor Peter Coffee is the only one that has survived through history from that date. One died and never married and the other moved to Bermuda where he also died.

The original Gilmers in America were descended from the Gilmores from Scotland in the 1100's. My great grandfather was the cousin of a man named Gilmer who built a coastal steamer. His uncle built a coastal steamer in Georgia and settled in SE Texas and became a shipbuilder, lumberman and blockade runner out of Port Arthur Texas during the civil war. My great grandfather Willima E. Gilmer and worked his passage from Georgia to New Orleans on his uncle Gilmer's coastal steamer, took a river steamer on the Mississippi and Red River and finally on a keel boat to Jefferson, Texas.