Personal list overriding master list

I'm using aspell-0.60.6, installed via macports.  I have a command-line app developed under xcode 3.2.  I don't think any of this matters, other than the aspell version.

Anyway, my app checks spelling against the master en-US dictionary, as well as a personal whitelist, formatted as per the aspell documentation (single-line header followed by a newline-separated list of words).  This personal whitelist is not dynamically populated by aspell...it's done manually.

Here's what I think the relevant call sequence is:

AspellConfig* theConfig = NULL;
AspellSpeller* theSpeller = NULL;
AspellCanHaveError* possibleErr;

theConfig = new_aspell_config();

aspell_config_replace(theConfig, "lang", "en_US");
aspell_config_replace(theConfig, "personal", "SomeAbsolutePathToMyWhitelistFile");

possibleErr = new_aspell_speller(theConfig);
if (aspell_error_number(possibleErr) != 0)
{
	puts(aspell_error_message(possibleErr));
	goto fail;
}

theSpeller = to_aspell_speller(possibleErr);

Now, if I do this, it doesn't appear that aspell is looking at the master dictionary, though I believe it does look at my personal whitelist.  However, if I remove the line:

aspell_config_replace(theConfig, "personal", "SomeAbsolutePathToMyWhitelistFile");

then the master dictionary is used, but of course not my personal whitelist.

This is driving me crazy.  I can't seem to figure out how to use both.  Can someone point out what I'm doing wrong?