Thanks to Maynard for finding Cornell University's online "Making of America" site: http://library8.library.cornell.edu/moa/ At the bottom of that main page, one can click on "Search" and type in our surname. One gets, as Maynard found, one article in one 1897 journal that contains the name Poythress: a book excerpt called "A Hunt-Supper In Old Virginia." The book is set in the days just before America's war for independence began, and there is no indication whether the book is just historical fiction, or whether it might be based on some family diaries, etc. The book is identified as "A Son of the Old Dominion" by Mrs. Burton Harrison; published (apparently in about 1897, since it is in the journal's "Reading from New Books" column) by Lamson, Wolfe & Company, Publishers, then priced at $1.50. Near the end of the article, in two consecutive paragraphs, we learn that the host of the dinner party is a Colonel Poythress who is referred to as "Hugh Poythress" by his wife. Cornell's bibliographic citation for the article, and notes about how to get the plain text of it, are shown below. Once you are viewing it as "text" you can save each page as a plain text file - with the file-extension of TXT - just give it a unique name, such as Poy-p485, to distinguish it from the next page, p486, that you save. As Cornell's caution (copied below) mentions, the text needs a slight amount of editing in a couple of places where the Optical Character Reading mis-read the original blurred letter of a word. The article can also be viewed (& saved) as a PDF file, using Adobe's free PaperPort Viewer. Hope this helps. The website's Terms of Use are shown at the bottom here. Barbara = = = Search: "poythress" * The Living age ... / Volume 214, Issue 2771: pp. 409-496 - p. 485 1 match of 'poythress' - p. 486 5 matches of 'poythress' - p. 487 3 matches of 'poythress' in: Title: The Living age ... / Volume 214, Issue 2771 Publisher: The Living age co. inc. etc. Publication Date: August 14, 1897 City: New York etc. Pages: 914 page images in vol. A note on viewing the plain text of this volume: A Note and Some Instructions on Viewing the Plain Text of the Making of America volumes Searching in the Making of America is made possible by using Optical Character Recognition software to create text files that "sit behind" the page images. OCR accuracy is high but varies from page-to-page depending on a number of variables. Many of the original book and journal pages have become brittle, faded, and foxed, while others have been written on or otherwise marred. Any of these factors can cause the program to mistake one letter for another. Ornamental text, illustrations and tables also cause problems for the OCR program, since it tries to make words out of the lines and dots in the illustration. Errors during scanning production, such as skew, also cause errors in OCR accuracy. The plain text is not corrected or proofread (this would be very expensive and time consuming). Many users have asked if they can have access to this plain text, even in its uncorrected form. We believe that in most cases people will still want to look at the page images of the books and journals, but we have decided to make the text available to users so that they can save it, cut and paste if desired, or use the "find" feature in a text editor or word processor to locate a word on a page. We think that this will be of benefit to our users. If you want to view the plain text, there are a couple of ways to accomplish this: Page by page viewing: Go to the desired page and choose "view as text" from the view as menu in the toolbar at the top. As you move forward or back in the work, you will continue paging through plain text until you choose another "view as" option (such as 75% or thumbnail). Entire books or journal volumes: You may choose to view an entire book or journal volume in plain text. When you click on the download link at the bottom of this page, you will be presented with a dialog box that gives you the option of saving the file. By default, the file will be saved as HTML, which can be viewed with a web browser (text will not be broken up by line or page -- it is one large block of text). You can also change the file extension to .txt to save as text for viewing with a text editor or word processor (this preserves line and page breaks). Please be aware that some of these texts are as long as 1,000 pages and will take a long time to download, particularly over a modem. Such a large download may also crash your Web browser. 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