Found her name in a relief camp registry I did not know existed. Have not stopped thinking about it since.
Spent the entire afternoon at the local historical archive today, chasing down a specific thread of family history I have been half-heartedly researching for years now without ever making much genuine progress, my grandmother’s family and their experience during the devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood, a piece of family history I have heard fragments of my whole life without ever tracking down the actual documentary record behind those scattered oral accounts.
I found her, properly, for the first time, in a relief camp registry I did not even know existed until the archivist helping me today pointed me toward it, a genuinely meticulous, handwritten ledger listing families displaced by the flood and processed through one of the many temporary relief camps set up across the region during that specific catastrophic spring. Her name, spelled slightly differently than my family currently spells it, sat there in faded ink alongside her parents and two siblings I had heard mentioned occasionally over the years but had never actually confirmed existed through any documentary source beyond family memory.
I have not been able to stop thinking about that specific ledger entry since I left the archive this afternoon, a small, official record of my own family at what must have been one of the genuinely most difficult moments of their entire lives, displaced from their home, processed through a relief system that history has since documented as having treated Black and white flood victims with genuinely, deeply unequal care and resources, a specific historical injustice I have read about extensively in the broader academic literature on the 1927 flood without ever quite connecting it, until today, to my own direct family history.
The archivist, genuinely knowledgeable about this specific period of local history, spent nearly an hour with me after I found the registry entry, helping me understand the broader context of exactly which relief camp my family had been processed through and what conditions they likely would have faced there, context that added a considerably heavier weight to the bare names and dates in the ledger than I had been prepared for when I first sat down at the archive’s reading table this morning.
I think there is something genuinely important about this kind of historical research that goes well beyond simple curiosity about where I personally come from. Understanding my own family’s specific experience during this flood connects me, in a considerably more immediate and personal way than any textbook ever managed, to a broader history of this region and this city that I think every resident owes it to themselves to actually understand properly, rather than simply absorbing the more comfortable, sanitised version of local history that tends to circulate more casually.
I am planning to go back to the archive next week specifically to keep tracing this same thread further, curious whether I can locate any additional records documenting what happened to my family in the months after that initial relief camp registration, whether they returned to their original home once the floodwaters finally receded, or whether, like many displaced families from this same period, they ended up settling somewhere else entirely as a direct result of what the flood took from them.
This kind of research feels, in its own way, genuinely connected to the flying I have been learning this same year, both requiring a specific kind of patient, careful attention to detail, both offering an entirely new vantage point on a city and a family history I thought I already knew reasonably well. I keep discovering, this year especially, how much I still have left to properly learn about both.
I mentioned today’s discovery to my flight instructor at my lesson this afternoon, purely because I could not stop thinking about it and needed to tell someone before I had fully processed it myself, and he pointed out something I had not quite considered, that flying over this same city now, from an altitude and a vantage point my great-grandparents could never have imagined for themselves, gives me a genuinely unique way of holding both histories simultaneously, the family that once had to flee this land’s worst flooding on foot and by whatever transport they could find, and their own descendant now learning to look down on that same land from an aircraft she is learning to pilot herself.
That specific juxtaposition has stayed with me the rest of the evening, a small, private thread connecting two entirely different pursuits I have been quietly working on this same year, each one, in its own way, teaching me something new about a place and a family I thought I already understood reasonably well before I actually started properly looking closer at both.
I am planning to bring a printed copy of today’s ledger discovery to show my instructor properly next lesson, curious whether he might have any insight into which specific flight paths would take me nearest to wherever that particular relief camp was actually located, if any trace of the site even remains recognisable today after nearly a century of the region’s own continued development and change. It feels like a genuinely fitting way to honour both threads of this year’s learning at once, tracing my family’s history from an altitude they themselves could never have imagined possible.
More from this author at Siobhan O’Donnell, prat.uk.