Dear Georgia Whitson, When I am stumped on a surname or a place, I dip into the internet by using the search engine www.google.com Since Scudder is not such a common name (despite Laura Scudder), I typed in quotation marks "scudder family" and came up with lots of links. I suggest you try some of those links and see if anyone knows about the Scudders in Mississippi. (My lineage is cursed with common surnames, and so google.com doesn't help me a lot.) Even though that surname Scudder seems to be known in New England, don't rule out that some of them may have come to Mississippi. II was surprised to read in the 1850 census of Warren Co., MS (Jackson area) that several of the large plantation owners (and consequently slaveowners) were born in such places as Pennsylvania. The Mississippi River was the superhighway of the US [after the Louisiana Purchase] prior to the establishment of a good railway network. And, of course, I am old enough to know when there were hardly any superhighways in the US--mostly attributed to the activities of General Eisenhower when he became president. E.W.Wallace