Covering the same ground as the major motion picture The Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey, this is the extraordinary true story of the anti-slavery Southern farmer who brought together poor whites, army deserters and runaway slaves to fight the Confederacy in deepest Mississippi. "Moving and powerful." -- The Washington Post. In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth, Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted the Confederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against it. A pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South who refused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton, for two years he and other residents of Jones County engaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyond the scope of the Civil War. In this dramatic account of an almost forgotten chapter of American history, Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer upend the traditional myth of the Confederacy as a heroic and unified Lost Cause, revealing the fractures within the South.
" ... provides updated county and town listings within the same overall state-by-state organization ... information on records and holdings for every county in the United States, as well as excellent maps from renowned mapmaker William Dollarhide ... The availability of census records such as federal, state, and territorial census reports is covered in detail ... Vital records are also discussed, including when and where they were kept and how"--Publisher decription.
Across a century, Victoria Bynum reinterprets the cultural, social, and political meaning of Mississippi's longest civil war, waged in the Free State of Jones, the southeastern Mississippi county that was home to a Unionist stronghold during the Civil War and home to a large and complex mixed-race community in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Legend of the Free State of Jones was the first authoritative explanation of just what did happen in Jones County in 1864 to give rise to the legend and now to a major motion picture starring Matthew McConaughey.
This easy-to-understand guide through a maze of research possibilities is for any genealogist who has Mississippi ancestry. It identifies the many official state records, incorporated community records, related federal records, and unofficial documents useful in researching Mississippi genealogy. Here the contents of these resources are clearly described, and directions for using them are clearly stated. Tracing Your Mississippi Ancestors also introduces many other helpful genealogical resources, including detailed colonial, territorial, state, and local materials. Among official records are census schedules, birth, marriage, divorce, and death registers, tax records, military documents, and records of land transactions such as deeds, tract books, land office papers, plats, and claims. In addition to noting such frequently used sources as Confederate Army records, this guidebook leads the researcher toward lesser-known materials, such as passenger lists from ships, Spanish court records, midwives' reports, WPA county histories, cemetery records, and information about extinct towns. Since researching forebears who belong to minority groups can be a difficult challenge, this book offers several avenues to discovering them. Of special focus are sources for locating African American and Native American ancestors. These include slave schedules, Freedman's Bureau papers, Civil War rolls, plantation journals, slave narratives, Indian census records, and Indian enrollment cards. To these specialized resources the authors of Tracing Your Mississippi Ancestors append an annotated bibliography of published and unpublished genealogical materials relating to Mississippi. Including over 200 citations, this is by far the most comprehensive list ever given for researching Mississippi genealogy. In addition, all of Mississippi's local, county, and state repositories of genealogical materials are identified, but because most documents for tracing Mississippi ancestors are found at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the authors have made the state archival collection in Jackson the focus of this book.
Between late 1863 and mid-1864, an armed band of Confederate deserters battled Confederate cavalry in the Piney Woods region of Jones County, Mississippi. Calling themselves the Knight Company after their captain, Newton Knight, they set up headquarters in the swamps of the Leaf River, where they declared their loyalty to the U.S. government. The story of the Jones County rebellion is well known among Mississippians, and debate over whether the county actually seceded from the state during the war has smoldered for more than a century. Adding further controversy to the legend is the story of Newt Knight's interracial romance with his wartime accomplice, Rachel, a slave. From their relationship there developed a mixed-race community that endured long after the Civil War had ended, and the ambiguous racial identity of their descendants confounded the rules of segregated Mississippi well into the twentieth century. Victoria Bynum traces the origins and legacy of the Jones County uprising from the American Revolution to the modern civil rights movement. In bridging the gap between the legendary and the real Free State of Jones, she shows how the legend--what was told, what was embellished, and what was left out--reveals a great deal about the South's transition from slavery to segregation; the racial, gender, and class politics of the period; and the contingent nature of history and memory. In a new afterword, Bynum updates readers on recent scholarship, current issues of race and Southern heritage, and the coming movie that make this Civil War story essential reading. The Free State of Jones film, starring Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Keri Russell, will be released in May 2016.
"The County Courthouse Book is a concise guide to county courthouses and courthouse records. It is an important book because the genealogical researcher needs a reliable guide to American county courthouses, the main repositories of county records. To proceed in his investigations, the researcher needs current addresses and phone numbers, information about the coverage and availability of key courthouse records such as probate, land, naturalization, and vital records, and timely advice on the whole range of services available at the courthouse. Where available he will also need listings of current websites and e-mail addresses." -- Publisher website.
The Genealogy Annual is a comprehensive bibliography of the year's genealogies, handbooks, and source materials. It is divided into three main sections.p liFAMILY HISTORIES-/licites American and international single and multifamily genealogies, listed alphabetically by major surnames included in each book.p liGUIDES AND HANDBOOKS-/liincludes reference and how-to books for doing research on specific record groups or areas of the U.S. or the world.p liGENEALOGICAL SOURCES BY STATE-/liconsists of entries for genealogical data, organized alphabetically by state and then by city or county.p The Genealogy Annual, the core reference book of published local histories and genealogies, makes finding the latest information easy. Because the information is compiled annually, it is always up to date. No other book offers as many citations as The Genealogy Annual; all works are included. You can be assured that fees were not required to be listed.
