Searching for Austin JOnes - or any other early Mississippi resident Well, if you have more time than money, you may want to look at the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) website at the following URL and try to track down all the Joneses who may have put in a claim for land in Mississippi, particulary in the early days. <A HREF="http://www.glorecords.blm.gov">http://www.glorecords.blm.gov</A> Of course, this could be an overwhelming task with a name like Jones. The search link is in the green stripe at the top. To search, I inserted the name jones, and then I started out with a (first letter of alphabet). Try it for b and so on--26 letters in all. That may speed your search somewhat. A person's name (A. Jones) came up, but he put in his patent claim in 1850, which would have been too late for a man whom you think MAY have been the father of your Austin Jones born in the 1820s, you say, in Mississippi. This early date implies that his father got to Mississippi soon after the Louisiana Purchase. (Do some research on the Louisiana Purchase and then some research on the formation of Mississippi, which at first was a territory. An encyclopedia--American, not British--probably can help out here.) You want to find a candidate Jones who probably filed for a patent in the 1820s or 1830s. I understand people who grew cotton for a living piled into Mississippi (from all over, not just the South) after the invention of the cotton gin, because they now could grow more cotton and process it easier than in the past. They needed more land than the puny tracts which they owned in their previous residence. (Look up either cotton gin or Eli Whitney, while you are at it.) One would think that only Southerners came to Mississippi, but a reading of the 1850 census--birthplaces alone--is quite revealing. Lots of Pennsylvanians, and some of them big slave-owners. There is a fairly good book called Tracing Your Mississippi Ancestors by Anne S. Lipscomb & Kathleen S. Hutchison, published by University Press of Mississippi in 1994. I imagine it is still in print. Incidentally, the Fam Hist Library in Salt Lake City has a good many films for Wilkinson Co. and Copiah Co., MS. I know, because I have used them. Look at the catalog on <A HREF="www.familysearch.org">www.familysearch.org</A> The link is on the lower right. Also near there is a link to a list of over 3,500 fam hist centers around the world. You can borrow film for a short time for a limited amount of money through a nearby LDS center--and some people tell me some public libraries have agreements with FHL. Ask--genealogists need to ask LOTS of questions. There is so much to know. E.W.Wallace Happy hunting!