At 07:44 AM 10/25/98 -0500, you wrote: >As a lifelong Yank, slowly realizing he has hundreds of years of southern >roots, I'm trying to get a sense of what my ancestors lived like. My Jones >ancestors moved to Jackson by the 1850s. Why would they have moved there? >What's the land like? What would the economy have been like back then? > >Strangely, my G-grandfather moved from Jackson to Boston around the turn of >the century. Seems like a very odd emmigration pattern. Did Jackson folks >enlist in the Navy back then? > >So, I'd appreciate anybody's impression of the county in the latter half of >the last century. > Chris, I live in Jackson, Co, FL and it has not changed that much in the last 100 years. It is still a farming community growing mostly cotton and soy beans. It is a great place to raise children. We still have the old ways of raising them. Most of "big city ways" have not reached us yet, but have a feeling that they are well on there way. The reason that most people come to the area was around the 1820's this part of FL opened up and land was free or very cheap and poeple wanted a fresh start. It did not really atart to grow untill after the Civil War when salt was very hard to find. >From the things that I have found about the county it was and is a very poor county in jobs. Most of the land here was not used until the late 1960's. It was a very hard life for all that lived here, but the people where very helpful to each other. Some of people did enlist in the Navy but not every many. I hope that gives you some idea about what it was like here at the time. Keep on climbing Mary B Gay \ \ \ | / / / ( o o ) (_) --------o00o---o00o-------- Surnames we are researching: Ballard, Bass, Benefield, Birdsong, Bone, Coley, Daniel/s, Doyle, Ellis, Freeman, Foss, Gay, Hienz, Keel, Kirsch, Maloney, Merritt, Skinner, Stewart, Swearingin, Symer, Weaver, White, Whitty, Wills, Wright, and many more that I do not know of. --------ooo0-----0ooo---------- ( )---( ) \ ( ) / \__) (__/