Miscellaneous Ramblings

Last week I attended the Itawamba Historical Society's Meeting where Roy Turner did a presentation on preserving documents and photographs on Tuesday night.  Then on Thursday, I met with a group of members of Monroe County Historical Society and then with the entire society in the evening at a "reorganizational meeting."  I spoke to them on things that historical societies were doing in various locations.  The good news is that the society is collecting dues again and the 1997 issue of their publication is now at press.  I hope a lot of people get behind it and help get it back on track so that researchers of history and genealogy in the county will be assisted.

While I was over in Aberdeen, I visited the Evans Memorial Library and stumbled across a resource that gave me a much needed clue on a Thornton collateral line.  Earlier this summer I had found a book of transcriptions of Clay County cemeteries in the Amory library and had found my great grandfather's half-brother's burial location in McPherson Cemetery.  Upon a visit to this cemetery, I discovered that there was an empty grave next to his.  I assumed that his wife Ida was buried in the unmarked grave although I could find no indication there was a footmarker such as the one Jim had.  I knew that one of his sons was buried in Memorial Gardens in West Point but when I visited that site there did not appear to be any family markers there except that one family plot with 3 graves.  I knew that the Greenwood Cemetery was not included in the cemetery book, but I didn't realize that it had been previously surveyed and published.  In that book, I looked in the index thinking that perhaps some of Jim's children or grandchildren might be buried there.  I discovered that his son Cliff and Cliff's second wife were buried there, daughter (or more likely step-daughter) Alice was there also in a grave next to Jim's wife Ida!  I'm not really sure why Ida was not buried next to Jim but now I need to make a trip to West Point to get obituaries (now that I have dates) and to photograph these additional markers.  You just never know what you'll find!  I would have probably never noticed this book if the tables of books that had accumulated had been shelved.  I guess this is one of those serendipitous finds!