Mississippi Research Trip to Attala and Holmes Counties - Part I

Late last month, we made a trip to Attala and Holmes County, Mississippi, to conduct some interviews and on-site research for the book I am writing about Tillman Branch. The trip was a successful one, and I had the opportunity to meet up with some folks I already knew (including a few relatives) and to make the acquaintance of others I had never met. Most of the roads we traveled, with the exception of a few country lanes, were familiar to me, since my family spent many weekends visiting relatives in these counties during my growing up years. The hilly, wooded countryside is still just as green and lush as in years past, and the open fields filled with horses, cows, and newly baled hay, showcase the spectacular labor of many farmers who still own land passed down through several generations. We saw a number of trucks laden with logs, an indication that raising and selling timber is still among the money-making crops in this area.

We spent our first two nights of the trip in Kosciusko at the Maple Terrace Inn, a stately Queen Anne mansion, now a delightful bed and breakfast owned by a local optometrist and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. Routt. It was a repeat visit for us, since we had the pleasure of staying at the inn a few years ago.  Located on a residential street, and quite near the Attala County Library, the five bedroom house was built before the turn of the century by one of the town's early postmasters. Local legend says the house has its own resident ghost, believed by many townspeople to be that of a former owner, Frank Olive.

Our stay at the Maple Terrace Inn was a comfortable one that included a real southern breakfast, including biscuits and grits, prepared each morning by a lovely woman named Pamela.  Our visit to Kosciusko included a trip to the library to visit Ann Breedlove, the library's research genealogist and a long-time acquaintance of mine, and a drive around the quaint, brightly painted town square. Kosciusko has been designated a "Main Street U.S.A." city and was included a few years ago on a list entitled "Best 100 Small Towns to Live" in the U. S. The architecture of Kosciusko's residences, courthouse, and its old churches, along with its location on the Natchez Trace Parkway, maintained by the National Park Service, make Kosciusko a must-see Mississippi historic destination. Our trip would not have been complete without a meal at a highly-recommended local eatery across from the courthouse named Rib Alley and getting a photo of the Attala County Courthouse, one of Mississippi's beautiful, historic structures.

Attala County Courthouse
Kosciusko, Mississippi

Our next stop after leaving Kosciusko was the town of Goodman, Mississippi, where Tillman Branch owned two business establishments, his second family lived, and where his children attended high school.  As we traveled out of Kosciusko on Highway 14, we passed by the community of Newport, where numerous members of the Branch family, including three sets of my paternal great-grandparents, grandparents, and my father lived during the past 150 plus years. Tillman Branch, a first cousin, once removed, of my paternal grandfather, Clark Commander Branch, was born and raised in the Newport community, and later lived there with his first wife and their four children. Just down the road from Newport is Seneasha Church and Cemetery, where Tillman Branch and his parents, Edward Tillman Branch and Artissa ("Nettie") Ousley Branch are buried. Other deceased Branch family members are also buried in Seneasha Cemetery, along with many allied family members having surnames of Ables, Burrell, Mabry, and Ousley.

After crossing the Attala-Holmes County line, near Big Black River, a dark, meandering river that empties into the Mississippi near Vicksburg, we arrived in the small town of Goodman. In the early 1900's, Goodman was the center of trade for residents of the nearby rural Attala County communities of Newport, Sallis, Shrock, and others. The First Methodist Church in Goodman, Mississippi, was where my paternal grandmother's funeral was held in 1991, and Hillcrest Cemetery, north of town, just off U.S. Highway 51, is where dozens of my Branch and Porter ancestors and their descendants are buried. While we were in town, we placed some fall silk flowers in the urn between my grandparents' headstones.

Grave Site of My Paternal Grandparents
Clark Commander Branch and Lelia Porter Branch,
Hillcrest Cemetery
Goodman, Mississippi

Our next stop was the Goodman Library, where I had an appointment to meet Mrs. Jennette Moore, the librarian. We arrived a few minutes early, so we passed the time driving around the residential streets near the library, looking for the old home where my great-aunt Stella Branch Young and her husband Woodard Young, lived until they died. My great-grandmother, Claudia Baldridge Branch, Stella's mother, lived in a small cypress house situated next-door to the Young residence. Based on family information, Claudia Baldridge Branch's house had been "imported" from the "country" setting where she previously lived, and set up next to the house belonging to her daughter and son-in-law. Aunt Stella's husband was a disabled World War I veteran, and many local residents still remember him and my Aunt Stella, who worked for the Goodman school cafeteria for over 20 years.

After Mrs. Moore arrived at the library, we met each other in person for the first time, and had a pleasant time getting acquainted. We also discussed plans for an open meeting with local residents later in the week, a meeting that Mrs. Moore had sent for publication in Lexington's Holmes County Herald and had advertised with flyers that she placed in local business establishments. The meeting's purpose was to draw in local people who might provide me with information about Tillman Branch, his life and his death, and who might provide old photos of the Goodman and Newport areas. Just before noon that same day, we visited the Senior Citizen Center where I talked to some older residents who knew Tillman Branch in the 1950's and early 1960's before he died. On Friday, I returned for the event, where Mrs. Moore introduced me to the former librarian, Mrs. Bobbie Nance. As it turned out, Mrs. Nance is a distant cousin of mine, one who is related through the husband of another paternal great aunt, Ezma Branch McDaniel.  For someone like me, with deep roots in Attala and Holmes Counties, I don't find this unusual at all. In fact, I was quite pleased to meet another cousin!

At Goodman Library
September 20, 2013

We left Goodman around noon, headed north to the railroad town of Durant, Mississippi, where I planned to take a photo of an old mural in the post office there, before driving over to Lexington, the county seat. As a matter of courtesy, I introduced myself to the Postmaster, explaining that I am writing a book and would like to include a snapshot in the book of the unique mural above the postal window. He was very friendly and quite helpful and readily gave me permission to photograph the beautiful, old oil-on-canvas mural that depicts farmers, highway surveyors, and railroad crews working side by side in this central Mississippi town. According to some research, he mural is the artistic work of Isidore Toberoff and was commissioned by the U. S. Treasury Section of Fine Arts. Entitled "Erosion, Reclamation and Conservation of the Soil," Toberoff completed the mural in 1942, the same year that he received a Pulitzer Prize in art.

Mural in Durant, Mississippi Post Office

Of note here is that Durant, Mississippi was named for Pierre Durant, a well-known French trapper and furrier who built a very nice house in the 1800s for his family on the banks of the Big Black River. After the treaties with the Choctaw Indians were signed, some members of Durant's family left the area with relatives who had tribal connections. Later, members of the Durant family settled in a part of what later became the state of Oklahoma. Ironically, a town in that area was also named for a Durant son, and today, Durant, Oklahoma, like Philadelphia, Mississippi, is home to many Choctaw descendants. Also, like Philadelphia, Durant, Oklahoma has a large hotel and casino, a place that is known simply as "Choctaw" to those who live in southeastern Oklahoma and adjoining areas of North Texas.

Our trip to Durant took on a different direction after I told the postmaster a little more about the book I am writing. When I told him I was interested in seeing the former locations of more than a dozen nightclubs that existed in the town before liquor became legal in Mississippi in 1966, he told me I needed to talk to a man named Sonny McCrory, who operated a business just south of the post office.

To Be Continued........

The Story of Carlotta Nelson Fairchild - Introduction

This past Tuesday, I posted a photo on Cemeteries of Dancing Rabbit Creek of the grave stone that marks Carlotta Nelson Fairchild's burial place in Hillcrest Cemetery in Holmes County, Mississippi. I photographed Carlotta's headstone while visiting this old cemetery off U.S. Highway 51 North, near the town of Goodman, early last year.  My actual purpose of the trip to Hillcrest Cemetery was to visit the graves of my paternal grandparents and great-grandmothers and to photograph all the headstones of my deceased Porter and Branch ancestors who are buried there.  After I completed what I had set out to do, I walked among the other graves, intrigued by the Confederate section of the cemetery, where many of the community's young men lay buried, and by so many old and unusual monuments. 

As I neared the top of the hill where the earliest burials at Hillcrest began, I immediately was drawn to a family plot that contained the grave sites of members of the Nelson Family. The plot was surrounded by a wrought iron fence, rusty but still in fairly good condition.  Based on the substantial size of the monuments located in the plot, I thought the Nelson family must have been among the more prosperous citizens of Goodman around the turn of the twentieth century. 

But what really caught my eye was the word "Denmark,"  inscribed on the markers, which told me that Nelson family members had been born in Denmark. The fact that someone buried in Holmes County, Mississippi, in the very small hamlet of Goodman, was born in Denmark is significant.  Of the hundreds of thousands of people who migrated through Mississippi during the 1800s in their search for land and new lives, the Nelson family would be in a very small minority of settlers who would have been born in Denmark.  

How and why the Nelson family would have chosen Holmes County and Goodman as a place to settle fascinated me, to say the least, and I wanted to know more.  So I photographed the gravestones of those buried inside and near the family plot, including Carlotta's.  Those photographs led me on a research journey that ended just this week.  I hope you will follow me here as I tell Carlotta's story.

Next:  Carlotta Nelson's Beginnings

In Memory of Anna Jones Covington 1908 - 2010

The following obituary was published on March 4, 2010, in the Clarion Ledger, Jackson's daily newspaper:

"Anna Jones Covington, 101, passed away on March 1, 2010. Born Emily Vianna Jones on June 30, 1908, she was the oldest of the nine children of James Franklin Jones and Minnie Lee McCrory Jones. Visitation was held Wednesday March 3, 2010, from 5:00-8:00 pm at Southern Funeral Home in Durant. The funeral service will be on Thursday, March 4, 2010, at 2:00 pm at Southern Funeral Home in Durant. Interment will be at the Seneasha Cemetery in Goodman. Throughout her life, "Miss Anna" enjoyed gardening and her many canine companions. She was a member of Shrock United Methodist Church, Shrock United Methodist Women, and the Society of Descendants of Washington's Army at Valley Forge through the service of her great-great-grandfather, Ensign James McCrory, 9th North Carolina Regiment. Survivors include three children, Christine Vianna Covington of Goodman, Duncan Cicero Covington of College Station, TX, and Noel Jones Covington Sr. of Goodman; one brother, Tommy Jones (Nancy) of Kosciusko; four grandchildren; six great grandchildren; and five great-great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband of 61 years, Duncan Noel Covington; an infant daughter; a son, James Howard Covington; and seven brothers, William Jones, Johnny Jones, Walter Jones, Melvin Jones, Lee Anderson Jones, Cecil Jones, and Bennie Jones. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to: Seneasha Cemetery Fund P.O. Box 328 Goodman, MS 39079 or Shrock United Methodist Church P. O. Box 137 Goodman, MS 39079."

Fatal Shooting of Tillman Branch Reported in Holmes County Herald

Early this morning, I began some research to find a newspaper article that reported the death of Edward Tillman Branch, the subject of my blog post here yesterday. First I visited the Footnote.com site. I have used this site before, with success, to conduct research about various ancestors. But I had not used the portion of the site that includes the Small Town Newspaper archive until today. Actually, I first found the article I needed, detailed later in this post, by searching on the News portion of Google's website. What I found was that some of the articles included in the Small Town Newspaper archive can be read there for free. The Small Town Newspaper archive contains copies of three Mississippi small town newspapers, including the Holmes County Herald, published in Lexington, Mississippi. Scanned copies of the Herald, beginning in the 1960's, are available for viewing, and I was quite surprised, and very pleased, with what I found.

Although I have not yet found the original news article that reports Tillman's death when it occurred in the spring of 1963, I did locate a copy of the Herald's publication on January 2, 1964. The front-page article is similar to many newspaper articles still published early each new year that provide a timeline of significant events, serious and light, that happened during the previous year. Included in the article was a report dated April 18, 1963 that read "Kosciusko negro charged with fatal shooting of Tillman Branch in Goodman night club." The name of the nightclub nor the gunman's name was not stated.

Edward Tillman Branch was buried in Seneasha Cemetery in Attala County, and a photo of his grave stone can be seen here.

David Herbert Donald, Native of Goodman, Mississippi, Dies in Boston, Massachusetts

This is a reprint of an article about Donald's death that appeared in yesterday's edition of the Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Mississippi's daily newspaper.

"Goodman native, Lincoln historian dies

The Associated Press • May 19, 2009

NEW YORK — David Herbert Donald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil War and American South whose expertise on Abraham Lincoln brought him a wide general audience and reverence from his peers, has died.

Donald died of heart failure at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston on Sunday while awaiting heart surgery, said his wife, Aida. He was 88.

“Of course, I am devastated,” said his wife of 54 years. “He was a wonderful husband and father and he had a spectacular career as a teacher.”

A professor emeritus at Harvard University, Donald won Pulitzers for biographies of abolitionist Charles Sumner and novelist Thomas Wolfe. But his books on Lincoln became his legacy. Presidents from John F. Kennedy to the first George Bush summoned him for lectures and fellow scholars acknowledged his prominence.

An award was even named after him, the David Herbert Donald Prize for “excellence in Lincoln studies.”

In 2005, Donald was the first honoree.

He was working on a “character study” of John Quincy Adams at his death, his wife said. “He was a very hard worker, and his family, his writing and teaching were his life in that order,” she said.

Donald published his first Lincoln book in the late 1940s and kept at it for more than 50 years, going back on repeated vows to move on to another subject. His books included “Lincoln at Home,” a study of his family life, and “We Are Lincoln Men,” essays about Lincoln’s friends and associates.

“Lincoln,” a single-volume biography of the president, came out in 1996 and became so popular that presidential candidates Bill Clinton and Bob Dole both claimed they were reading it. Years later, when customers at the Lincoln Memorial bookstore would ask for a good biography, Donald’s book was recommended.

Some reviewers, however, faulted Donald for insisting on “the essential passivity” of Lincoln, an interpretation that The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley found contradicted by the president’s “determination and vigor” in carrying out his decisions.

Donald, the grandson of a Union cavalry officer, was not a Lincoln man in his early years. Born into a farming family in Goodman, Miss., he fancied himself a musician before some odd twists landed him elsewhere.

He majored in history and sociology at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. After graduation, Donald hitchhiked to Indianola, Miss., where he was interviewed for a job as a high school band teacher, a position funded by sales from a Coca-Cola machine.

“The man who interviewed me told me I could have the job and I went to gather whatever I had and started to follow him out of his office,” Donald recalled during a 2005 interview with The Associated Press. “He said, ’You forget your hat.’ And I said ’I don’t wear a hat.’ And he said, ’You teach in my school, you’ll wear a hat.’ So I didn’t take the job.”

Donald looked instead at graduate schools. His academic adviser at Millsaps was too busy to help, so Donald wrote his own recommendations and was accepted into the University of Illinois. Years later, he visited the school and had a chance to see his records.

“I looked into my admissions file and it said, ’Admit this man. He has excellent letters of recommendation,”’ Donald told the AP.

Having grown up in a segregated town, he was interested in race relations and planned to study the post-Civil War era. But he also needed money and found a job working as a research assistant to a leading Lincoln scholar, James Garfield Randall.

For decades after Lincoln’s death, writing on the president was dominated by nonhistorians, such as poet Carl Sandburg, who wrote a best-selling, lyrical and famously unreliable biography. Randall helped transform Lincoln studies into a professional discipline.

Donald’s mentor encouraged him to write about Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon. “Lincoln’s Herndon” began as a dissertation and became Donald’s first book, published in 1948, with an introduction, ironically, from Sandburg.

Donald’s reputation grew throughout the next few decades as he carefully picked apart the Lincoln myths dear to poets, dreamers and politicians. In such classic essays as “Getting Right With Lincoln” and “The Folklore Lincoln,” he noted Lincoln’s transformation from laughing stock to saint upon his assassination and the efforts of both Democrats and Republicans to claim him for their parties.

During his AP interview, Donald acknowledged that he, too, had changed his feelings about Lincoln.

“When I started out, I wasn’t interested in Lincoln, and frankly found him a tiresome old fellow who was rather long-winded, told too many stories, was kind of a rough, frontier sort,” said Donald, who dismissed more recent theories that Lincoln was gay or chronically depressed.

“As I grew older, I realized the jokes and stories he told were really very funny and they always had a point to them. And I watched the way he worked with people and what an extraordinarily adept politician he was. ... He was much more sensitive and human than I had thought before.”

Donald married Aida DiPace in 1955 and had one child, Bruce Randall. The Donalds moved to Lincoln, Mass. in the 1970s, not in homage to the president, but because of good schools and proximity to Boston.

In addition to his wife and son, Donald is survived by two grandchildren. Graveside services at Lincoln Cemetery are scheduled for Wednesday."

Family Reunion Time 1956

With the school year ended, and summer just weeks away, kinfolk from all over the country will be flocking home for family reunions. Most southern families take these reunions very seriously, and Mississippians are no different. Family members living in other states often take hard-earned vacations to make the trek home to visit with relatives they may see only during these gatherings.


The photograph above was taken at one of these events. This particular gathering occurred on the occasion of my great-grandmother's 80th birthday. The place is Goodman (Holmes County) Mississippi, in the yard between my great-aunt Stella Branch Young's home and the home of her mother, Claudia Baldridge Branch, my great-grandmother. The time was a Sunday afternoon in late summer of 1956. My great-grandmother is pictured in the front, on the right, seated between two of her daughters. It appears that she is holding a wrapped birthday gift in her lap. My mother and I are pictured to the left, sitting next to each other, and my father is standing to the right in the back of the picture.

Vertie's Ring - A Story of Lost Love

This is a picture of my paternal grandmother's sister, my great aunt, Vertie Porter. Born September 22, 1896, in Attala County, Mississippi, Vertie was named for her maternal grandmother, Malverda (also spelled "Melverda" and "Melvertie") Gibson. During the early portion of her adult life, Vertie was a schoolteacher. After teaching school in several places outside of Mississippi, including Stuttgart, Arkansas and in St. Louis, Missouri, Vertie moved to Memphis, Tennessee. There she worked at the University of Tennessee Dental School and lived with her older widowed sister, Etta Porter Parker, until Etta's death from cancer in October 1966.

Although Vertie was an attractive and educated woman, she never married. According to family stories, Vertie had fallen in love with someone in her early twenties, and the couple became engaged to be married. But before they were married, Vertie lost her husband-to-be in an automobile accident. I don't recall ever hearing her fiance's name, so unfortunately I am unable to include it in this post. It seemed that Vertie never met anyone else who could measure up to her beloved, so she never married.

For as long as I can remember, Vertie still wore the beautiful platinum filigree and diamond engagement ring her deceased fiance had given her as a symbol of his devotion. As a young girl, I believed Vertie's ring was the loveliest one in the world, certainly the most beautiful I had ever seen at the time. And on a few occasions when I was young, she even allowed me to try on the ring. My, how it sparkled! When I asked my mother some years ago if she knew what happened to Vertie's ring, she told me the sad story of how Vertie had given it to a niece who allegedly had later sold it.


Recently, I found the second photograph in this post while going through a box of uncatalogued old photographs that belonged to Vertie's sister, my paternal grandmother. Although there are no clues written on the back of the photograph, I believe it is a picture of Vertie and her fiance, and likely one of only a few that may exist. Based on the manicured foliage in the background and the pergola under which the couple were photographed, my best guess is the pictures were taken in the Spring in a park.


Vertie lived almost fourteen years after her sister, Etta, died in Memphis. After retiring from her job, Vertie later returned to Mississippi to live near relatives. And in August of 1980, one month short of her 84th birthday, Vertie Porter died.

Claudia Baldridge Branch and Her Only Son

Pictured here are my paternal great-grandmother, Claudia Baldridge Branch, born September 9, 1879, and her only son, Clark Commander Branch, who was born on August 9, 1899. In addition to Clark, Claudia and Edward Arthur Branch had four daughters, Ezma, Catherine, Laura, and Stella. I have previously written posts here about both the Branch family and the Baldridge families.

This photograph, taken around 1951 in front of our house in the Mississippi Delta, is the only one of just Clark and his mother that I know exists. At the time, Grandma Claudie, as she was known to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, was living in Goodman, Mississippi. and was likely visiting our family at the time.

Although I was too young to know the value of asking Grandma Claudie questions about her family and her life before she died in 1964, I have always thought she must have been pretty proud of her son. After she lost her husband when Clark was only 15 years old, as the only son, he became the primary breadwinner for the family, and a farmer like most of his own ancestors. And during his life, it was evident to me that Clark's sisters, too, admired and respected him, not only for his role as a father figure growing up, but for the honest, hardworking, and loyal man he became as an adult.

Clark Commander Branch died on January 19, 1979, in Jackson, Mississippi, of complications from heart disease, the same disease that had caused his mother's death. He is buried in Hillcrest Cemetery, Holmes County, Mississippi, next to his wife of 56 years, Lelia Porter Branch, and near Claudia, his beloved mother.