Tributes to Soldiers

The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal published some great stories about soldiers, past and present.

Lamar House Restoration

Oxford's historic Lamar House is getting a much needed restoration. It was home to L.Q.C. Lamar.

New Blog on Itawamba County

The Itawamba Historical Society has created its own blog. Be sure to check it out!

A Must Read

If you aren't reading Hill Country of Monroe County, Mississippi on a regular basis, you are missing a genuine treat!

Argonne Days

Horace Baker shares his memories of World War I in this book which has been republished. Read about it in the Aberdeen Examiner's article.

Heritage Gathering

The Northeast Mississippi Heritage Gathering is coming up in Aberdeen on June 8-9. The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal has a great article on the event.

Memorial Day at Shiloh

Shiloh is across the line in Tennessee, but you can't talk about the events of Shiloh without talking about Corinth, which is in Mississippi! An event is planned for Memorial Day at the park.

Judge Senter

The Senter family is important to Itawamba County's history. His branch of the family moved to Monroe County. There is an excellent article on Judge L. T. Senter, Jr. in today's Sun Herald.

Back from NGS

I spent last week at National Genealogical Society's Conference in the States in Richmond, Virginia. It was wonderful, as usual. I spoke to Greg Boyd of Arphax and encouraged him to get more Mississippi volumes out in their wonderful map series. Several of the used book dealers had a few books that Mississippi researchers might find useful if researching in the counties addressed in the volumes. Willow Bend Books had their usual selection of Mississippi books, including the 1860 Agricultural Census index volumes and the 1st volume of the 1890 census reconstruction. Jonathan Sheppard Books always has some 8 1/2 x 11 maps of various states, including Mississippi.

Next year's NGS will be held in Kansas City, Missouri on May 14-18, 2008. The 2009 conference will be in Raleigh, North Carolina.

While we are on the topic of conferences, this year's Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference will be held in Fort Wayne, Indiana on August 15-18. The 2008 conference will be in Philadelphia on September 3-6, 2008. The 2009 conference will be in Little Rock. Lots of Mississippians should go to the Little Rock Conference.

Progress in Mississippi

Mississippi has made a lot of progress since the Civil Rights era. According to StateMaster, Mississippi has the fewest number of race-related hate crimes of any state.

Diigo Research Group for Mississippi

Family Matters is reporting the creation of a research group at the social annotation site Diigo for Mississippi resources. I was able to find several things about Mississippi when I searched tags, but I couldn't locate the Mississippi group. Perhaps there is a delay in its showing up!

Update: The link is: http://groups.diigo.com/groups/msgenresearch.

Entertaining Post on Elvis

There's a very interesting post about an early Elvis concert in Amory at Hill Country of Monroe County Mississippi. I found myself laughing out loud several times as I read it.

Carnival of Genealogy #23

. . . is up at Creative Gene!

Biloxi Newspapers Digitized

Tom Kemp with Genealogy Bank has announced that the Biloxi Herald is now available in GenealogyBank's Historical Newspaper collection for the dates April 2, 1907 to March 31, 1919. This is available for individual subscriptions on a monthly or annual basis.

School Days

One often-overlooked resource which is very helpful for Mississippi researchers is the censuses of educable children which are available for the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of these are available online for Tallahatchie County researchers at http://www.rootsweb.com/~mstallah/education/index.html. Some have been published by local historical and genealogical societies to help their efforts. Examples of these are Tate County at http://www.rootsweb.com/~mstate/gensoc.html and Tishomingo County at http://www.rootsweb.com/~mstchgs/ (click on publications). Itawamba Historical Society has published these lists in various issues of Itawamba Settlers over the years. This publication is indexed in PERSI. This database is available to many library patrons and society members. One researcher offers to do lookups in the lists for Lawrence and Lincoln Counties at http://www.rootsweb.com/~msquery/. A very good description of the Oktibbeha County lists is available at http://www.sturgisms.homestead.com/educable.html. In the lists I've seen, the head of the household is listed and each child of school age is listed along with her or her age. If you go to http://www.familysearch.org and choose to search the catalog, you can do a keyword on the term "educable" and come up with the various ones which are available at the Family History Library and in Family History Centers across the country.