The parentage of Obediah (Obadiah) Snow probably will never be documented or proven. About 200 Ancestry.com family trees perpetuate what I believe is a "myth" that he was the son of Wiley Henry Sims & Mary (Hartsfield) Sims and was born on 21 Feb 1804 in either Oglethorpe, Macon, or Newton County in Georgia (at that time GA was still largely wilderness with many Native American Indian inhabitants).
Another handful (perhaps 2 dozen) family trees give other Snow parents, notably Frost and Snow, Jr., 1756-1852, but he lived in Surry Co., North Carolina, not GA.. These were mostly-illiterate Appalachian mountain families and birth records were non-existant. No record has ever been found for Obadiah. And there were several contemporary men named Obediah or Obadiah Snow in the South-East USA.
We DO have marriage records for Obadiah's 2 marriages: in 1826 to Malana McMurray in Newton Co., GA. After her 1848 death, Obadiah remarried to Ruth Rowan in Saline Co., Arkansas, with a marriage record. And we do have US Census records for him but they offer little detail, especially before 1850.
There were several Snow families who settled in Georgia after the American Revolution as war veterans were given farm land in payment for their military service. It is highly improbable that Obadiah was a "bastard" Sims either due to the strong Baptist & Methodist faith of these families then.
In sum, this supposed Sims-Hartsfield parentage is another example of Ancestry.com's "myth copying as new reality" from family tree to family tree and No Relationship between Wiley Henry Sims and Obadiah Snow existed.
