"I never got a chance to meet them," McCray said while gripping a book titled "Millie-Christine: Fearfully and Wonderfully Made" by Joanne Martell. "It would have been a joy to have met them."

McCray, 67, was a small child when she first learned about Millie-Christine McKoy, her great aunties - conjoined twins blessed with beautiful voices, lovely looks and global admirers, including Queen Victoria.

"They were always being visited by people after they retired to Welches Creek in North Carolina," McCray said. "They were fascinating, and people were fascinated with them."

"About three years ago, I started working on a book about them," said McCray, whose fraternal twin sister, Millie Christine Owens, died in February 2005. "I don't want my aunts to be forgotten."

Isabell McKoy Owens, McCray's mama, named her twin daughters after Millie-Christine. The conjoined twins, builders of churches and schools in North Carolina, died Oct. 8 and 9 of tuberculosis in 1912. Millie died first. They were 61.

In her book, Martell, who is based in the North Carolina Sandhills, wrote that a midwife named Aunt Hannah said Christine weighed about 12 pounds, while Millie was about five pounds.

"Millie was so frail, her mother said, that if it hadn't been for the legs and arms, she'd have thought it was only a knot on [Christine's] back, instead of a second child," Martell wrote.

"We, children in the family, couldn't understand why they were joined together," said McCray while sitting in the office of her Bucksport home, about 12 miles outside of Conway. "We would wonder why they couldn't be separated. It was just a burden to me. I felt sorry for them because they were in an impossible situation."

They penned their autobiography, titled "History and Medical Description of the Two-Headed Girl," at 17. Their 32-page showbiz booklet sold for 25 cents at their appearances. In 1883, Millie-Christine made $25,000 a season as a part of John B. Doris's Great Inter-Ocean Circus. By the time they were middle-aged, they were able to purchase the plantation on which they were born. Each was a talented singer, pianist, dancer and devout Christian. Both women were fluent in five languages.

"Sometimes, they would converse with people in a different language - one would talk to people in French, while the other would talk to people in German," said Martell, 80, in an interview with The Sun News.

Just as their older contemporaries, conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker born in 1811, Millie-Christine even showed up at P.T. Barnum's renowned American Museum in New York City. They were only 3 years old.

The United States National Library of Medicine and National Institute of Health said the girls were sold three times, legally and illegally, between the ages of 10 months and 6 years old.

At one point, they were stolen by an unidentified Texan before their owner, Joseph Pearson Smith, a Wadesboro, N.C., merchant, and their pregnant mother, Monemia McKoy, who called the twins "my baby," rescued them in 1857 in England.

"I pitied them as a child because I thought they had been used and taken advantage of," McCray said. "I didn't think they were happy - having people steal you wasn't a good thing."

Yet, despite the potholes on their life's roads, Millie-Christine never fell. They stayed planted firmly, even when all ground around them seemed to be loose.

"I've put them in my world," said McCray, who hopes to finish her book soon. "And I've put myself in their world. In my mind, they were always with me. In my mind, they are always free."

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