Introductions: archives, Jackson, Ed Payne and Gaelic

The McCain Archives in at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg are electic. There are minutes from the Leaf River Baptist Church which various ancestors attended; Forrest County criminal records, in which all my McLemore great uncles' names -- Amos, Howard and Leroy -- appear repeatedly in connection with offenses relating to owning and operating a distillery; a vast collection of photographs donated by a commercial photographer who worked in Hattiesburg in the 1940s and 1950s; and, maybe best of all, a Hattiesburg "city directory," which is basically a phone book that also includes address, whether the person in question owns or rents, and his/her occupation. That alone is worth this trip.

Met the wonderful Ed Payne yesterday in Jackson. His ancestor, the principled outlaw Jasper Collins, presumptively was an accomplice to the murder of mine, Major Amos McLemore in October 1863. (Jasper was one of Newt Knight's lieutenants.) And yet there we sat in a hip little Jackson cafe, chatting warmly, exchanging ideas and sharing hypotheses. Tomorrow Ed's going to show me the inner workings of the Mississippi State Archives.

After Ed and I parted, I attended a Celtic Fest in Jackson. Sat in on a workshop for fiddlers peopled by a surprisingly large number of amateurs wanting tips and guidance on their fiddling. Ate pink cotton candy. Learned from an Irish linguist that the correct, Gaelic pronunciation of the original McLemore name, Mac Gille Mhuire, is Mac-YILL-eh-Vwurr-uh. Yes, with a "v" sound. It means "son of a devotee of [the Virgin] Mary." The Mac Gille Mhuires, named as such, originated in the Celto-Norse regions of the Irish and Hebridean seas, including the Isle of Man, the Isle of Lewis, and Waterford. I.e., Vikings raided the lands ringing the Irish Sea and intermarried, if that's the right word, with the resident Celtic women, largely absorbing their language and culture.

Drove out Highway 11 today under a rain-laden sky past the McLemore Old Place -- the log cabin built in the 1830s by Major Amos McLemore's father. Dad was born and lived there on and off throughout his childhood. After only a few weeks of marriage to my Mommee, Elma Rose McLemore, my Dad's father slipped out a cabin window. My Aunt Wilma remembers her uncles and the other grownups gathering in the large cabin hallway with kerosene lamps and guns and Mommee "fainting" repeatedly. My uncles went out after Dad's father but never found him. Roughly nine months later My Aunt Wilma walked into the house one day when she was 9 years old and saw her mother sitting in bed with a new baby. She asked in dismay, "Where did you get him?" to which Mommee replied "Out of a hollah log."

The rain on the way home was so torrential my wipers couldn't keep up with it. I almost had to pull over.