A Mississippi First Family

A Mississippi First Family
Author: Giulia L. Saucier
Publisher:
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2015-02-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781478749875

The family roots of thousands of Americans begin with those French men and women who came, willingly or not, to settle La Nouvelle France and La Louisiane. While A Mississippi First Family: The Sauciers from 1603 to 1865 is about a particular family, in a larger sense it is about all those who have left a known world behind to make a life for themselves in an unknown world. Though the lives of ordinary people go unrecorded, this lack does not discount their importance. Great men may dream dreams, but ordinary men are needed to carry them out. The story of the Sauciers begins with Charles Saucier, organist to Louis XIV, King of France. His son, Louis Charles, sailed to the wilds of Canada in 1665 where he sired the Canadian branch of the family. Jean Baptiste Saucier, Louis Charles' younger son, one of sixty Canadians under the leadership of Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, founder of La Louisiane, arrived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1699 to help establish the French there ahead of the hated British. Eventually, he married Gabrielle Savary, one of the Pelican Girls, sent by King Louis to wed the Canadians. Together they became pillars of Colonial Mobile and started a branch of the family whose descendants would settle along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in Alabama, Louisiana, Illinois and Missouri. Their southern beginning in Old Mobile, called the first American city because its boundaries were not enclosed by a wall, a change that marks the beginning of the modern in this country, ranks this site, some have said, as being one of the most important in the region and in our nation.

America's First Families

America's First Families
Author: Carl Sferrazza Anthony
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

"Carl Anthony opens the door to the world's most famous residence to reveal life as it was actually lived there. He takes readers into the heart of loyalties and estrangements, and the emotional pressures politics brings to bear upon the forty White House families, from their arrivals to their "notices to vacate." Readers will enjoy an unprecedented tour of the previously unseen private rooms as used and decorated by each family. Revealed too are the personal proclivities of the presidents and how their families both sustained them through public crises and were used to political advantage. They'll get a firsthand look at the preparations for White House weddings and other occasions; meet the parents and children of the presidents - as well as an assortment of eccentric relatives - and discover the patterns of working, resting, and relaxing that shaped family life."--BOOK JACKET.

Mississippi Provincial Archives

Mississippi Provincial Archives
Author: Patricia Kay Galloway
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 1984-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807110683

The publication of these final two volumes of the Mississippi Provincial Archives brings to a close the important scholarly project initiated by Dunbar Rowland and A. G. Sanders in the 1920s, suspended at the time of the Great Depression, and then revived in 1979 under the editorship of Patricia Kay Galloway. The Mississippi Provincial Archives assembles and translates the documents in French archives relating to military, diplomatic, colonial, and economic activities in the lower Mississippi Valley from the founding of the original settlement at Ocean Springs, or “Old Biloxy,” in 1699 through the abandonment of the French Louisiana colony in 1763 at the close of the French and Indian War with England. The two present volumes focus on the years 1744 through 1763, but also contain material supplemental to the earlier volumes concerning the Natchez War (1730), the first Chickasaw campaign (1736), the second Chickasaw campaign (1739–1740), and additional documents that chart the rise of the Choctaw chief Red Shoe. The twenty-year period chronicled in-depth in Volumes IV and V was a time of intense rivalry with the English for Choctaw trade and allegiance. The documents chronicle the events of King George’s War (1744–1748) and of the concurrent struggle for control within the Choctaw nation that began with the revolt of a large faction led by Red Shoe and expanded into a civil war after the chief’s death at the hands of pro-French Choctaws. The settlement of this conflict was soon followed by the outbreak of the French and Indian War (1756–1763), at the end of which the French were forced to give up their colony—but not before concluding diplomatic arrangements with the Indians that would plague the victorious English for years to come. Mississippi Provincial Archives provides an invaluable source for understanding the history of French and English relations with the Indian nations of the South. But these collections also document many other aspects of the social history of the French colony, including the activities of merchants and other entrepreneurs, the development of the lumber industry along the coast, military justice and the founding of military outposts in the interior, and the relationships between the military governors and their civilian counterparts. Extensively annotated, these two volumes complete—after a delay of more than fifty years—a work of great significance for the study of the French Louisiana colony.

Delta Jewels

Delta Jewels
Author: Alysia Burton Steele
Publisher: Center Street
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2015-04-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1455562831

Inspired by memories of her beloved grandmother, photographer and author Alysia Burton Steele -- picture editor on a Pulitzer Prize-winning team -- combines heart-wrenching narrative with poignant photographs of more than 50 female church elders in the Mississippi Delta. These ordinary women lived extraordinary lives under the harshest conditions of the Jim Crow era and during the courageous changes of the Civil Rights Movement. With the help of local pastors, Steele recorded these living witnesses to history and folk ways, and shares the significance of being a Black woman -- child, daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother in Mississippi -- a Jewel of the Delta. From the stand Mrs. Tennie Self took for her marriage to be acknowledged in the phone book, to the life-threatening sacrifice required to vote for the first time, these 50 inspiring portraits are the faces of love and triumph that will teach readers faith and courage in difficult times.

We End in Joy

We End in Joy
Author: Angela Fordice Jordan
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2012-08-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1617036064

We End in Joy: Memoirs of a First Daughter offers an extraordinary perspective on public life in an intimate account from the daughter of a highly controversial southern governor and a widely beloved first lady. Angela Jordan enjoyed a comfortable and quiet life in Vicksburg, the small southern town in which she was reared. She was a thirty-five-year-old mother of three daughters, and a woman with a politically liberal bent, when, against all history's odds, Mississippians elected her conservative Republican father, Kirk Fordice, governor in 1991. Suddenly fate threw the whole Fordice family into the glaring lights of public life. They made headlines, enlivened the 6 o'clock television news, and provided fodder for every dinner table conversation and robust political speculation around the Southeast. As the Governor and First Lady Fordices' longstanding marriage dissolved slowly and publicly over two terms in office, everyone with a newspaper subscription or a cable connection watched the train wreck and high-profile betrayals. In honest, direct, sometimes poignant, and often funny prose, the author offers a rare glimpse into a profoundly complex family and its painfully public fall from grace. Though the book is the story behind the headlines of one of Mississippi's prominent families, Jordan's narrative will also resonate with anyone who has experienced humiliation, divorce, or loss, whether public or private. Through it all, Jordan finds a story of joy ascendant, and the wonder of discovering that in the deepest sorrow, light and love always shine through.

Once in a Lifetime

Once in a Lifetime
Author: Elise Varner Winter
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1626746044

Once in a Lifetime reveals the broad range of Elise Varner Winter's activities as first lady of Mississippi during the term of her husband, Governor William F. Winter (1980–1984). Drawn from her personal journal, which she kept daily, this account includes the frustrating moments as well as the exhilarating ones, from keeping house to visiting the White House. The position of a state's first lady is one of the most public of roles. Yet few people know what a first lady actually does. In Elise Winter's memoir, her sense of history, her talent, and her perseverance to record her activities and observations provide a unique opportunity for the reader to understand what life in the Mississippi Governor's Mansion was really like on a daily basis. This book reveals her traditional roles—planner of elegant dinners, sophisticated hostess, hands-on gardener, and steward of the Mansion and its historic collection of antique furniture and decorative arts. But she emerged as a modern first lady, intensely interested in public education and in the state penitentiary, for which she developed several important initiatives. She recounts fascinating events from Governor Winter's administration, its tensions and its accomplishments, such as passage of the Education Reform Act, a success in which Elise Winter played an indispensable role. Many of the issues of thirty years ago remain critical today—insufficient funding for education, budget deficits, prison overcrowding, and the need for prison reform. Elise Winter observes everyone and everything with a fresh eye for detail and describes them all with honesty, clarity, and simplicity. Her observations reflect her intellect and insight, as well as her sense of humor. This is a woman's story, a human story, about hopes and doubts, about setting high standards and sometimes feeling inadequate, and about the imperative of continual efforts to make her state a better place for all who live there.

Death in the Delta

Death in the Delta
Author: Molly Walling
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2012-09-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1617036102

Growing up, Molly Walling could not fathom the source of the dark and intense discomfort in her family home. Then in 2006 she discovered her father's complicity in the murder of two black men on December 12, 1946, in Anguilla, deep in the Mississippi Delta. Death in the Delta tells the story of one woman's search for the truth behind a closely held, sixty-year old family secret. Though the author's mother and father decided that they would protect their three children from that past, its effect was profound. When the story of a fatal shoot-out surfaced, apprehension turned into a devouring need to know. Each of Walling's trips from North Carolina to the Delta brought unsettling and unexpected clues. After a hearing before an all-white grand jury, her father's case was not prosecuted. Indeed, it appeared as if the incident never occurred, and he resumed his life as a small-town newspaper editor. Yet family members of one of the victims tell her their stories. A ninety-three-year-old black historian and witness gives context and advice. A county attorney suggests her family's history of commingling with black women was at the heart of the deadly confrontation. Firsthand the author recognizes how privilege, entitlement, and racial bias in a wealthy, landed southern family resulted in a deadly abuse of power followed by a stifling, decades-long cover up. Death in the Delta is a deeply personal account of a quest to confront a terrible legacy. Against the advice and warnings of family, Walling exposes her father's guilty agency in the deaths of Simon Toombs and David Jones. She also exposes his gift as a writer and creative thinker. The author, grappling with wrenching issues of family and honor, was long conflicted about making this story public. But her mission became one of hope that confronting the truth might somehow move others toward healing and reconciliation.