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In their footsteps

Any genealogist who has ever had the great good fortune to find and walk an ancestor’s land knows there are no words that can be found — and none that are required — to describe the experience.

You just soak it in.

So it has been for The Legal Genealogist in this quick trip in to Mississippi to find the land of my Gentry and Robertson ancestors.

As I turn my steps northeast today, heading home, I am a little frustrated at not finding certain evidence of where my Gentry third great grandparents are buried — but think it’s likely to be where their son George is buried, right down the road from our mid-19th-century land. There are a number of worn stone markers in that very old cemetery — and the location is just right.

But the land… just being there and seeing what they saw… that was good enough no matter that I didn’t find a single thing new in the paper trail. The physical trail was good enough.

On, or very near the Gentry land, some day lilies brightened the field in front of an old barn.

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Not far away, the Pearl River makes its muddy way through Neshoba County (and other counties) — and my third great grandfather Elijah Gentry rode the Pearl River circuit as a Methodist Episcopal preacher before marrying and having a boatload of kids.

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Down the road from their land is the White Oak Cemetery where, I suspect, Elijah and wife Wilmoth are buried. It’s a lovely quiet peaceful place filled with old stones.

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Among the stones that can be read are those of some of my Gentry cousins — from a later generation.

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It’s been fun, Mississippi. We’ll have to do this again some time…

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