This website is dedicated to
the children
of
Franklin County, Mississippi.
They hold the keys to the future;
we hold the keys to the past.
On a rainy winter day in late December, 1964, I was introduced to the fascinating world of family history by a tiny little lady, who at that time, was already 70 years young! That lady was Miss Cordelia Carothers Geoghegan, my husband’s great-aunt and their family historian.
As I sat at her knee and listened to the wonderful tales she told, I became more and more excited about the idea that you could actually find bits and pieces of history and painstakingly put them all together and create a priceless legacy for future generations to treasure. She had been a school teacher for many years but she never had a more grateful student than me.
She told me many things, but the thing I remember most is:
"If you teach them where they come from, they won't need as much help finding where they are going!"
I have tried to include as much Franklin County History as I can find so that one day, our children and our children’s children and all of the future Franklin County children, will know about us and our forefathers.
All the data you see on these pages was donated by unpaid volunteers who do it for the love of family history research. Sometimes the data is easily accessible in air conditioned offices in county courthouses staffed with friendly, helpful clerks. More often old records are in dank, dusty basements where mold and mildew flourish and there is no light and no place to even sit down, and the volunteer may be forgotten by the clerks who are busy upstairs at their brightly lighted desks. Or the data is gathered by a volunteer who spends his vacation in rural Mississippi in the summertime braving near 100 degree heat, unbearable humidity, and all manner of critters including
mosquitoes and snakes just to get to a cemetery, which may or may not be on a recognizable road. Sometimes the records are from a family Bible with faded names or maybe they transcribed a Census with impossible handwriting. For all of them, it is a labor of love.
These pages are not possible without their help. Thank you all!
And one last word for the children:
A wise man once said, "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it!"
Ann Allen Geoghegan
November, 2002
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