" ... 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.
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resources the authors of Tracing Your Mississippi Ancestors append an annotated bibliography of published and unpublished genealogical materials relating to Mississippi.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.
In post-Civil War years agriculture in Mississippi, as elsewhere, was in a depressed condition. The price of cotton steadily declined, and the farmer was hard put to meet the payments on his mortgage. At the same time the corporate and banking interests of the state seemed to prosper. There were reasons for this beyond the ken of the poor hill farmer—the redneck, as he was popularly termed. But the redneck came to regard this situation—chronic depression for him while his mercantile neighbor prospered—as a conspiracy against him, a conspiracy which was aided and abetted by the leaders of his party. Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics 1876–1925 is a study of the struggle of the redneck to gain control of the Democratic Party in orger to effect reforms which would improve his lot. He was to be led into many bypaths and sluggish streams before he was to realize his aim in the election of Vardaman to the governorship in 1903. For almost two decades thereafter the rednecks were to hold undisputed control of the state government. The period was marked by many reforms and by some improvement in the economic plight of the farmer—an improvement largely owing to factors which were uninfluenced by state politics. The period closes in 1925 with the repudiation and defeat at the polls of the farmers' trusted leaders, Vardaman and Bilbo.
