Welcome, Readers!

If this is your first visit to Mississippi Memories, thank you for stopping by today, and I hope you will visit again. If you have visited this blog site before, thank you for continuing to read my posts. Although I write primarily about my own family history, I also enjoy posting photos of historic and memorable places from throughout the beautiful state of Mississippi. As the blog's subtitle suggests, I write about "people, places, and things" - all related in some way to the state where I was born.

Recently, I wrote a series of posts about our Memorial Day trip through the Mississippi Delta, with stops in Greenwood and Indianola. A post about the last day of our trip, spent in Greenville, Mississippi, will appear on my blog tomorrow. Although the trip included some visits along the Mississippi Blues Trail, I managed to do some genealogy research, too. One of my own rules as a family history researcher is to never, ever, drive by a courthouse without stopping in or to drive by a cemetery without visiting and taking photos. And I did both on this trip!

The trip through the Delta included stops at two cemeteries, all in Holmes County, where most of my Branch, Porter, Netherland, Pettus, and Trigleth ancestors are buried. While there, I took many photographs of graves in Hillcrest Cemetery, Goodman, Mississippi, and of those in Coxburg Methodist Church Cemetery in the old town of Coxburg, near Lexington, Mississippi. Although I have already posted a few of these photos to my other blog, Cemeteries of Dancing Rabbit Creek, I will continue to add others over the next few weeks. I invite you to visit that blog, as well.

Although my own search for ancestors includes the families of Atwood, Baldridge, Branch, Commander, Garrard, Gibson, Merriwether, Neatherland/Netherland, Pettus, Porter, Trigleth, Wilds, and Williams, I often write about the family of others, too. Sometimes a fascinating grave stone may be the impetus for writing a post about the life of the deceased whose grave it marks. And since I love history and people, I often research and write posts about individuals, some famous, and a few that were infamous, who played roles in the development of the State of Mississippi.

A few brick walls that have yet to be broken down keep me researching and writing, and I don't anticipate running out of material for a very long time, if ever. For almost ten years now, I have been searching for ancestors of my great-great-great grandfather, John P. Gibson, born in South Carolina in 1799, and for those of his wife, Martha J. Williams, born circa 1820 in Alabama. According to their marriage certificate, Joseph Gibson posted the marriage bond when the couple were married on January 3, 1843 in Monroe County, Mississippi.

And even though my recent visit to the Coxburg Methodist Church Cemetery and to the historic town of Greenwood, Mississippi resulted in additional information about my maternal great-grandmother, Martha Elizabeth Garrard Neatherland, I still need more about the Garrard family before they arrived in Mississippi.

So I will continue searching for answers that I know are there; I just have not yet found them.

I hope you will join me on this search.....and who knows? We may be related!