Elaine & all, I'm about to be out of email touch for a couple of days myself & am really short on time now, but the short answer is that in the 1920 Census, when James Speed Poythress was age 90, I suspect that perhaps his hearing or speaking or both might have contributed to some confusion in whose birthplace he & the Census-taker were talking about. (& I guess it is even possible that at age 90, JSP was no longer sharp as a tack mentally, but I'll yield to someone from that family line who may know better about that possibility) At any rate, I haven't found many traces of any Poythress in Alabama or MS before James E. Poythress got there in about 1853. There was one, Littlebury Poythress, at some point I think earlier, in some further-over part of MS, but I've seen no indication of male descendants from him; think he just had one daughter who married a Bell, it seems like, from an estate or some similar record we've seen. And in the Sumter Co, AL - Lauderdale Co, MS area (adjacent counties) there was an earlier "Ben Portis" but I've never been able to find anything to tie him to the family. Since my own grandfather was a Nathan Poythress, and one of his father's brothers was a Nathan Poythress who died during the Civil War (never married; no descendants), I've always kept a sharp eye out for other Nathan Poythresses, but I've not seen any others in AL or MS. BP