Federal Records

Series 353 consists of a printed booklet containing a Christmas day menu and camp roster for Civilian Conservation Corps Company 5415, which did forestry work at Camp F-5, located about fourteen miles south of New Augusta, Mississippi. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was one of several programs established by the United States government to alleviate joblessness caused by the Great Depression. Originally established in 1933 as the Emergency Conservation Work Program, it did not gain its title of Civilian Conservation Corps until 1937. The CCC was a quasi-military organization that employed jobless young men to perform conservation work such as planting trees, fighting wildfires, controlling erosion, erecting dams, and other such activities. The men lived in camps, and a majority of their pay was sent directly to their families each month for their support, while the CCC provided the men with food, clothing, and medical care, as well as limited job training and educational opportunities. Roughly 3,000,000 Americans enrolled in the CCC program during its nine years of existence. More than 40,000 of them were Mississippians.

This subset of Series 2323 (Corps of Engineers Records) consists of eleven photographs taken after a deadly tornado swept through downtown Vicksburg on December 5, 1953. The storm cost the city of Vicksburg thirty-eight of its citizens, injured 270 more, and left 1,200 homeless ("Twist of Fate, Dec. 5, 1953," by Leslie Criss and Rhonda Smith, Vicksburg Evening Post, December 5, 1993). The images document the destruction on the following streets: Adams Street, Levee Street, Mulberry Street, Openwood Street, and Washington Street. The image captions were transcribed from the verso of the original photographs.

The series is made up of copies of rosters culled from county records, newspaper articles, and other sources that list Mississippi veterans (and widows and servants) of the Civil War, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and the War of 1812. These records were compiled as part of the Mississippi Historical Records Survey by employees of the U.S. Works Progress Administration between 1936 and 1939. Images of the records were created in 2011 by FamilySearch from originals at MDAH and are arranged alphabetically by folder description.

The series consists of typed and handwritten transcripts of interviews with formerly enslaved people from thirty-six Mississippi counties conducted by employees of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, as well as essays and administrative correspondence. The narratives contain information such as names of family members and owners, occupations, and other details of their lives. The interviews are brief, most containing an average of three to four pages, though all available drafts were imaged. A few from Harrison County include drawings of the subjects. At least one account appears to be a work of fiction. Images for most of the narratives were created in 2011 by FamilySearch from originals at MDAH. The documents associated with Ben Lewis of Adams County were scanned in 2012 by MDAH staff because they were overlooked in the initial project. Arrangement is alphabetical by county and, within the county, alphabetical by subject, then chronological by document.

These records include correspondence, reports, cemetery lists, field work sheets, and index cards for the state-wide veterans' graves registration project conducted by the Works Progress Administration. Sponsored by the American Legion and the Department of Archives and History, county-level workers located and registered the graves of veterans of wars through 1952 interred in Mississippi. Cemeteries in each county were surveyed and a field work sheet was prepared for each veteran's grave. The county workers then researched local records and newspapers and interviewed relatives to gather more information about each veteran. The work sheets were forwarded to the state project office in Jackson, where workers accessed records at the Department of Archives and History, the State Service Office (predecessor of the Veterans Affairs Commission), and other state and federal agencies to further round out the data, which was transcribed onto index cards. After the WPA project was completed, additional cards were added by the American Legion based on their participation in veterans' funerals. Images of project pages and cards were created by FamilySearch onsite at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 2011, except for two folders of World War I correspondence that were scanned by MDAH staff in 2013. All images in this series are arranged alphabetically by folder description, though several cards and pages were misfiled. Adjacent folders may contain each other's records.

The series consists of images from an album titled "Selected Photographs of Work Projects of the National Youth Administration for Mississippi," containing black-and-white photographs of NYA work projects in construction, education, health, production, and recreation throughout the state. The photographs are identified in the original album by typewritten captions on the album pages and, in some cases, handwritten captions on the photographs or negatives. Those captions have been transcribed and appear in quotation marks with the image.

The series consists of index "cards" (actually pre-printed forms with handwritten annotations) with data concerning the naturalization of foreign immigrants in Mississippi. The information was gathered from county circuit court records by employees of the U.S. Works Progress Administration between 1936 and 1941 as part of the Mississippi Historical Records Survey. Each form typically includes the following information: name of naturalization applicant; kind of proceeding; country of birth; date of arrival in U.S., port of entry, name and location of court, etc. Only twenty-seven counties are represented in this series: Amite, Attala, Clarke, Clay, Coahoma, Copiah, Franklin, Grenada, Harrison, Hinds, Holmes, Itawamba, Jones, Marshall, Montgomery, Neshoba, Noxubee, Oktibbeha, Panola, Pontotoc, Prentiss, Quitman, Sharkey, Sunflower, Tunica, Winston, and Yazoo. Images of the records were created in 2011 by FamilySearch from papers at MDAH and are arranged alphabetically by folder description.

The electronic component of this series consists of scans of photographic and photostatic copies of three lithographs produced ca. 1848 of lists of soldiers who served in Mississippi regiments during the Mexican War. Names of soldiers who resigned, were discharged, died of illness, deserted, etc. are noted by keyed symbols on the lithographs.

Series 456 consists of transcriptions of Jackson, Mississippi, General Land Office records made by Works Progress Administration Historical Records Survey employees in the late 1930s from originals then held by the State Land Commissioner. The transcriptions include the following: an abstract of land patents, Jackson, Mississippi, ca. 1824-1853; Choctaw District field notes of Edward R. Downing, undated; a field notebook of E. H. Wailes, 1823; field notes, 1821; a land patent book for Jackson, Mississippi, 1841-1919; and correspondence of Levin Wailes and Benjamin L. C. Wailes, 1795-1859 (indexed). The transcriptions were made as part of a Survey of Federal Archives project. Series 456 was digitized by FamilySearch onsite at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 2011. The images are arranged alphabetically by transcription name.

Series 443 consists of finished pages and draft copies of scrapbooks produced by the Works Progress Administration/Work Projects Administration (WPA) of Mississippi for the period 1936-1941. They include photographs, illustrations, and captions for "Improvement Projects," "Mississippi, A Pictorial History, 1798-1937," "Pictorial History: Mississippi Agriculture and Industry," "Pictorial History: Mississippi in Architecture," "Pictorial History of Mississippi," "Pictorial History of Mississippi Trees," and "Pictorial History, South Mississippi." Also included are a December 1937 map of the United States that shows Historical Records Survey projects, as well as an apparently displaced mimeograph of a September 1723 petition for road construction in Washington County, Pennsylvania.

The scrapbook of photographs of WPA improvement projects from around the state is undated, and there is no accompanying documentation. Captions below some of the photographs indicate projects were conducted by relief labor, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and RFC (Reconstruction Finance Corporation) labor.

The pictorial history scrapbook pages appear to have been rearranged at some point after being disbound, so images of trees are mixed with Mississippi history pages and so on. The pages were scanned in 2013 by MDAH staff in the order in which the curator processed them.