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Dear Miss Armstrong,
With respect to others, in answer to your question about whether the surnames "Childers" and "Childress" are the same, they are NOT the same. There is a regretably long-standing and widespread misconception among many part-time genealogical searchers that the two surnames are variations on a single surname. This misconception has confused and misled countless searchers over the years. But the origins and etymologies of "Childress" and "Childers" are quite separate and distinct.
The surname "Childress" and "Childers" entered colonial Virginia at approximately the same time. "Childers" was introduced by immigrants from England, and "Childress" came from a wholly different part of the British Isles.
Whereas the colonial "Childers" families that you will be encountering in your researches were members of the Church of England [owing to their origins], the "Childresses" that arrived in Virginia were all Presbyterians.
The confusion over the surnames "Childers" and "Childress" is understandable because no one has seen the Childress family Bibles that were used in colonial Virginia, nor have researchers been aware that oral histories were passed down in isolated Childress lines for the past 268 years.
The first Childresses in colonial Virginia bore the name "Childress" - NOT Childers. Among the several Childress families that arrived in colonial Virginia (all of them related), the principal family spelled their surname in the earliest entry in their family Bible with 2 "ss"es (although they hand-wrote it with 2 backwards facing "f"s - a somewhat atypical 17th century approach to spelling a leading "s").
Again, Miss Armstrong, there is no correspondence between "Childers" and "Childress" that warrants commingling or confusing these two surnames nor their family trees. What some perceive as frustrating spelling whims by county clerks and census takers, are, upon closer scrutiny and scholarly documentation, accurate reflections of two separate but similar appearing surnames.
Good luck.
Sincerely - Mark Childress
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