CARROLLTON - If, a hundred years from now, Bit Kyser isn't shining from the family trees his descendants are finishing, it'll mean his daughter, Mary Jane Blackmon, found another hobby.
Fat chance.
The genealogy bug bit Blackmon, a retired nurse, over a decade ago.
Since then, she's looked through many musty records, traipsed across many out-of-the way cemeteries, and exchanged hundreds of letters and e-mails about interlacing bloodlines with a considerable number of others similarly bitten.
Curiosity about ancestors is an odd mix of burden and pleasure.
A member of the Carroll County Genealogical Society, which was formed in February 1999, Blackmon also helped produce "Carroll County, Mississippi History and Families," due out in early May.
"It's at the printers as we speak," Blackmon said.
Judy Stanford, a book committee member and president of the genealogy society, said, "Everyone's excited about the interest in the book.
We've pre-sold 400 copies, and there are from 850-900 family histories in it, plus photographs and local history. It's fully indexed."
Some extra copies are being printed and will cost $65 the copy, plus $5 for shipping. Orders may be sent to Stanford at her address, P.O. Box 282, Carrollton, MS 38917.
The book will have a deep maroon cover with gold embossed writing on the cover, as well as an impression of the long-vanished mansion of Greenwood Leflore, Malmaison. It will contain 440 pages.
The book is expected to be a helpful and cherished volume, one more reference tool for individuals and for libraries. If there are profits, they will be used to help preserve Carroll County's written courthouse re-cords. Keeping this faith is obviously important to local genealogy leaders, as is preserving local cemeteries.
"We've had some good programs. We meet every other month, second Sundays, at 2 p.m. at the Carrollton-North Carrollton Public Library. We started at 17 members and the high has been 56. Annual membership dues are $10 per person or $15 per couple," Stanford said. Janice Browning McCrory is secretary-treasurer, and there are committees.
Often, people looking for information about their ancestors get frustrated.
Blackmon and her friends understand.
They've been there and expect to be there again.
Some frustrated voices find their way onto Internet query and message boards - and indirectly to members of local genealogy societies such as theirs.
"Our purpose is also to provide genealogy contacts for people from outside the county," Stanford said. "Courthouses just don't have staff for research. Sometimes queries sent to the courthouses are forwarded to us.
"At meetings we've read letters, some passed along from the courthouse, written by people who are often very vague - 'Send me everything you have on John Doe.' There's no way. We ask people to be very specific in their questions and to include a self-addressed and stamped envelope at the very least, or money for copies. Copying costs can really add up."
Putting together family histories is time-consuming, which can sometimes result in books, such as the long-awaited Carroll County book, or one that was self-published, home style, by Kathleen Corley Mason, who lives in Jackson but has deep roots within early Carroll County soil. Her book, "My Carroll County Kin," sort of happened, she said.
Mason's experiences help point out and bind the idea that there's just one real family - the "family of man." It's easy the deeper one gets into the records of Carroll County and its people, past and present, for example, to see how traditions and connections bind people together, if not actual blood relationships.
It's not one record here, or another there, that can be relied upon to produce a family tree, Mason says. It's all of it and stories and interpretation that work together.
The journey into the past is a way of honoring one's ancestors, never mind the fact what genealogists can dig up might be surprising and a wee bit uncomfortable. Also, it's a journey never to be quite finished, though there are the requisite stopping places.
"I found my fifth great-grands were never married," Blackmon confessed, "and the boys took the mother's name." Exactly who these ancestors were, Blackmon didn't say. What was apparent from her tone, however, was how welcome a plum was her discovery, her breaking the impasse back into those generations.
On some of her lines, she says she's stumped still.
She can envision future re-searchers scratching their heads over her own father's first name, "Bit." Anybody who's done a little looking can relate to the fact an initial here, a second name there, can be valuable clues in determining whether the ancestor you think you've found, is the real one.
Kyser, who died at age 88 in 1994 in Holmes County, where Blackmon was reared, "was sickly when he was born, and I gather they didn't think he'd live, so that was all the name he ever had."
Blackmon remembers a time she and another relative were visiting Kyser. "Probably we were around the dinner table, and I started asking about the past. I couldn't get any answers. My brother looked at me and said, 'You waited too late to start asking questions.' So I'll tell anyone who's interested in getting family histories to talk with the oldest relative they have, and take a tape recorder.
"That's the best starting point," said Blackmon, echoed by fellow Carroll genealogists Stanford and Betty Wiltshire. "Copy old family Bibles, study census records, marriage records, land deeds, probate and marriage records. Start making graphs and charts, take notes of where everything comes from. Go to cemeteries and read headstones."
Persistence and dedication mix in a genealogist's bloodstream, and Blackmon has these characteristics.
"Carroll County, Mississippi, Cemetery Records," compiled by a dedicated team of local volunteers headed by the late Ethel and Lawrence Bibus and Louise Marshall and published by Wiltshire's Pioneer Publishing Co., is an invaluable tool, Stanford said. The work encompasses cemeteries containing whites, basically, with these people closing the pages on their own work, however, with the stated hope someone younger would take up the torch and do the same sort of canvass of black cemeteries.
"It took 10 years to put this cemetery book together, and two years to put together our 'Carroll County, Mississippi History and Families,'" Stanford added. Internet genealogy sites, particularly message boards contained within various websites, are helpful tools, agree Blackmon, Wiltshire, and Stanford. So is the Mississippi Dept. of Archives & History in Jackson, especially, Blackmon said, because of the Civil War records stored there.
Quirky little skirmishes occur during sorties into the past, Blackmon said, sharing one of her own.
"Through Archives & History, I found one of my Ammons ancestors buried at West, not at Vicksburg, where he was killed," she said.
"His widow married a Denton after Ammons died. She's buried at Old Wheeling, a mile east of I-55 at West. I stomped all over there during my growing up years, and I never knew I was kin to those people. Mary Denton was my great-great-great grandmother."
Wiltshire's ending bit of advice to novice historians is this: "You have to prove your information, or you'll wind up with a useless family tree. I found in the Chickasaw County history where someone took people from the late 1700s to the early 1800s and gave them children that weren't even theirs. I'd traced the same family, and I've got proof."
Stanford reiterated the necessity of keeping coherent notes.
"Yes, because later, you're going to have all those conflicting stories."
