One of the most important corrections in the family history is the correction of the old two-brother tradition. For many years, family memory described two brothers named John and Andrew as the origin of the South Carolina line. The better reconstruction identifies the brothers as John and Anthony, with Anthony preserved in family speech as Antney. That correction is not a small genealogical adjustment. It prevents Andrew Poston of the nineteenth century from being pushed backward into the eighteenth-century migration story. It also restores the real structure of the South Carolina family branches. John and Anthony belong to the early South Carolina generation. Andrew belongs later, as a descendant in the Hugh Poston branch and as the namesake figure for the railroad-era community. John Poston of the South Carolina generation appears in the old Marion District and stands at the head of the senior surname line relevant to this manuscript. His branch carried forward through later generations, including John Jack Poston, Alfred Poston, and John Henry
Poston. Through that line the Poston surname continued directly into the modern family. Anthony Poston, the brother remembered as Antney, founded the collateral branch that became essential to the history of Poston, South Carolina. From Anthony came Hugh Poston, and from Hugh came the branch that produced Andrew Poston. Once Anthony is restored to the family structure, the relationship between the family and the town becomes clearer and more accurate. By the early nineteenth century, the Postons had become a Pee Dee family. Migration had turned into settlement. Settlement had turned into kinship density. The family no longer appears simply as a line moving south. It appears as part of a regional landscape of farms, marriages, churches, local neighborhoods, and river-country identity.