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The Latest
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Ashes of Justice: Why So Many Mississippi Courthouses Burned and what it means for family historians
If you have ever tried to trace your family history in Mississippi, you may have encountered a familiar and frustrating phrase in the archives: “Records…
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The $2 Barrier: How Mississippi’s Poll Tax Erased a Democracy
Have you ever considered the true cost of casting a vote? In Mississippi, for more than seventy years, that cost was a literal one—and it…
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Stuck in the Black Belt? Why Your Newton County Ancestors Might Be Hiding in the Piney Woods
For many family historians tracing their roots into Newton County, Mississippi, the trail naturally points eastward toward Alabama. Most researchers gravitate toward the famous Black…
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Greene County, Alabama: A Gateway Between the Carolinas and Mississippi
For many families researching their roots in Newton County, Mississippi, the story does not begin in Mississippi at all. Instead, it often leads eastward into…
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The Quiet Architects: Professional Life and Community Survival in Jim Crow Mississippi
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, education was the most subversive tool available to African Americans in Mississippi. For newly freed families, literacy…
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The Record Keepers: How the Whitehead Women Wrote Black Mississippi
The history of journalism in Mississippi is often told through the towering names of male editors, national publishers, and fiery civil rights leaders. But in…
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Grant, Johnson, Garfield: A Black Mississippi Family and the Politics of Hope
In the late nineteenth-century census records of Neshoba and Newton Counties, Mississippi, three presidential names appear across one extended Black family: Andrew Johnson, Grant, and…
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The Great Migration: Why the Belt Children Left — and Why Some Stayed
A Family at a Glance Before exploring the “why,” it helps to see where the Belt children ultimately planted their roots: Name Migration Pattern Burial…
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The Long Road Home: Debt, Foreclosure, and the Resilience of the Evans Family
In the history of Newton County, few stories illustrate both the vulnerability and resilience of African American landowners as vividly as the saga of the…
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The Master of the Deed: How Allen Rigsby Outpaced the Crop-Lien System
In the history of Newton County, Mississippi, we often hear about the promise of “Forty Acres and a Mule” — a promise that never truly…
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From the Balcony to the Brush Arbor: The Birth of the Black Church in Mississippi
Before the Civil War, the Black church in Mississippi was often a church within a church — a congregation worshipping under watchful eyes. Faith existed,…
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The DNA Truth: Using Genetic Testing with Wisdom and Care
In his episode of Finding Your Roots, LL Cool J discovers information about his family history that reshapes his understanding of identity. Like many people…
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