There is a corner of northeast Mississippi — the old Tishomingo County country that later split off into Alcorn, the ground around Rienzi, Burnsville, and the railroad town of Corinth — where nearly everyone we come from ended up living inside about twenty miles of one another. That much you might expect of an old family. Here is the part that still gives me chills: they were neighbors long before they were kin. The marriages that made us didn't bring strangers together. They joined families that had already been living side by side, down the same roads, for two, three, four generations.
We didn't guess at this. We read it, page by page, in the census books — the same handful of names turning up next door to each other, decade after decade, until the whole thing finally clicked into a single picture. This is that picture, told plain.
They came in from every direction and stopped in the same place. The Searcys came down out of North Carolina by way of Alabama. The Rories came out of North Carolina too, but by way of Tennessee — and they brought their Tennessee neighbors, the Rushings, right along with them. The Marlars came from Kentucky, the Barnes family from Tennessee, the Hamptons from Alabama, the Guthries all the way from Arkansas. Five states funneling into one corner of Mississippi across about forty years. Nobody planned it. But once they got there, hardly anybody left.
The oldest of our people we can put a finger on is Aaron Searcy, and he nearly slipped past us. In 1830 he was a young father in Shelby County, Alabama, with a brand-new baby boy in the house — a boy named Freeman. The census taker wrote the family name down as "Sercy," and the index later read his first name as "A. D." So for the longest time he looked like he wasn't there at all. He was there. Our family just had a lifelong habit of getting its name spelled wrong — Searcy, Sercy, Cearcy — and hiding in plain sight because of it.
By the 1840s Aaron had moved the family to Tishomingo, and by 1850 there he is, plain as day: a farmer of about sixty on his own place, with his wife Martha and a houseful of grown children — including Freeman, now twenty years old. Nine houses up that same road lived a millwright named Reuben Rorie, the richest man in the neighborhood, and in Reuben's house was a seventeen-year-old daughter named Mary Jane. Freeman and Mary Jane lived nine doors apart, both unmarried, both too young. It would be seventeen more years before they married. But the whole rest of their lives was already within walking distance.
If you want a single moment that proves the point, it's the 1840 census. On one man's route through Tishomingo, in the space of a few pages, you can find George Marlar (the Kentucky man whose great-granddaughter would marry into the Searcys a hundred years later), and just a couple of pages away Reuben Rorie — and squeezed right between them, a Searcy. Three of the families we descend from, all within a few doors of each other, decades before a single one of those marriages happened. Around them on those same pages sit the Cheeks, the Vanderfords, the Kemps, the Catheys, the Moodys, the Barnes — every one of them a name that keeps coming back. The family wasn't scattered and then gathered by marriage. It was already one neighborhood, waiting for the weddings to catch up.
It wasn't all prosperity. By 1860 Freeman was thirty, married to no one yet, landless, hiring himself out by the day and living in his older brother's house. That was the low point. And here is the tender detail we found: in that very year, just two doors down from where Freeman was laying his head, lived Adeline Rorie — Mary Jane's own sister — and her husband. Freeman was living two doors from his future wife's family seven years before he married her. The neighborhood kept putting them near each other, over and over, as if it already knew.
They finally married in 1867. By 1870 the county line itself had moved — Alcorn County was carved right out from under them — but the family didn't budge. Freeman now had his own farm and a brand-new son, a four-month-old baby named Robert Edwin. Next door lived the Catheys. And a few houses up, still, was old Silas Cheek.
Of all the things we found, this is my favorite. Silas Cheek lived beside our family in five straight censuses — 1840, 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880. Forty years. In 1840 he lived next to Mary Jane's father. In 1880 he was eighty years old and living next to Mary Jane and Freeman. A whole Civil War came and went, a new county was drawn over everyone's heads, and Silas Cheek was still right there at the property line, where he'd been since before the bride was even married. He wasn't the only one. The Vanderfords were beside us for sixty years. The Kemps, the Rineharts, the Catheys, the Rushings — these weren't strangers passing through. They were the fixed stars our family lived among.
By 1900 you can see the generations trading places on a single page. Freeman is seventy now, and Mary Jane sixty-eight, married thirty-four years, sitting in the quiet of an empty nest on their own farm. And under that same roof, listed as the next little family, is their son Robert Edwin — grown, working the sawmill, newly married within the year to a young woman named Hattie Guthrie. The old marriage closing out its long account, and the new one just opening, in the same house, on the same land. That new couple's line runs straight down to us.
While all of that was going on around Rienzi, thirteen miles east in Burnsville lived the other grandparent's people — the Marlars. George Washington Marlar was a Kentucky-born farmer who came down and settled with his wife, Mary Barnes, and raised a big family, among them a son everyone called "Bob Lee." And the beautiful thing is that the Marlars did the exact same thing the Searcys and Rories did: they kept their neighbors for decades. The Moodys, the Choates, the Higginbothams who lived beside George Marlar in his old age had been beside the Marlars back when he first arrived a young man from Kentucky. Both sides of our house, it turns out, held onto their neighbors as long as they held onto their name.
Those two worlds — the Searcy–Rorie world at Rienzi and the Marlar world at Burnsville — were only a half-day's wagon ride apart the whole time. And around 1940, they finally joined, when Lester Searcy (Robert Edwin and Hattie's boy) married Ruby Jewell Marlar (Bob Lee's great-granddaughter). Two families that had been near-neighbors in the same county corner for ninety years became, at last, one family. Us.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. Nearly every marriage in our tree grew straight out of the neighborhood. Freeman Searcy married Mary Jane Rorie — their fathers had farmed nine doors apart. Mary Jane's sister Adeline married a Houston — the very household that sat beside the Searcys in 1860 and again in 1880. Robert Edwin married Hattie Guthrie. A Searcy daughter married into the Rineharts — a family that had lived beside us since 1840. George Marlar's daughter Millie married a Cathey — and the Catheys had been neighbors of both the Marlars and the Searcys for generations. Every one of these was two neighbor families finally deciding, after decades of living side by side, to become one.
So when you look back at these people, don't picture a scatter of strangers who happened to marry into each other. Picture one small community that walked in from five different states, stopped inside a twenty-mile corner of Mississippi hill country, and then simply stayed — farming the same dirt, burying one another, witnessing each other's wills, standing up at each other's weddings, and slowly, marriage by marriage, becoming a single family. The Cheeks and the Vanderfords and the Rushings held the ground steady. The Searcys and Rories and Marlars married across the fence lines. And after a hundred years of being neighbors, they were us.
Five families walked in from five states and stopped inside twenty miles of each other,
and it took four generations for the marriages to catch up to the geography.
Every one of us is what that corner finally made.