Ancestry Magazine

There has always been an air of mystery in my family surrounding the life and death of my great-uncle Phillip James. The second of three brothers who immigrated from war-torn Macedonia to New Albany, Mississippi, around 1910, Phillip was the most personable and fun-loving of the three. Those who had known him spoke of him with deep love and even a sort of reverence, as if he had been their benefactor. His good humor enlivened the small restaurant in downtown New Albany where he and his two brothers worked. The only surviving photograph of him shows a handsome, cheerful young man looking into the camera in a catch-me-if-you-can pose. His new American life seemed happy and full of promise.

Then, at age 22, he died.

According to family stories, Phillip had taken the train to Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a vacation and while there had drowned under mysterious circumstances. Young, fit, and a good swimmer, Phillip was the last person anyone would expect to die by drowning. Family rumors hinted darkly at foul play, jealousy, and prejudice against immigrants. At the time, Hot Springs was known not only for its mineral pools, but for its gambling dens, tolerated by corrupt local officials with reputed links to organized crime—the city had, after all, been the site of a pitched gun battle between the local police department and the sheriff’s office over control of the lucrative office of mayor. Had Phillip run afoul of these elements? Even now, decades later, no one knew.

It seemed to me that Phillip’s main legacy to his family was a delicious sense of mystery. I wanted to find out more about this odd death.

Phillip’s gravestone in New Albany shows his date of death as 31 May 1914. As it happens, a new Arkansas law had taken effect just weeks earlier requiring death certificates for all deaths in the state, but Phillip’s certificate gives no special information on the death, simply listing the cause as “drowned by accident.” Records at the B. Gross Funeral Home, which handled the embalming and shipping of the body to New Albany, say the same.

The Garland County Courthouse in Hot Springs has no record of the death, even though it has coroner’s inquests on several other deaths around that time. Did this mean there was nothing unusual about Phillip’s drowning, or did it point to a cover-up? Members of the Garland County Historical Society told me that no inquest would have been performed if a sheriff’s deputy had been present at the time of death, or had found the body, and if, in his judgment, there was nothing suspicious about the death. Given the reputation of the sheriff’s department in 1914, however, this was not very reassuring.

The local newspaper, the Sentinel-Record, ran an article on the drowning two days after it happened, offering a rather unexciting explanation for the death. According to the story, Phillip had been in Hot Springs for several weeks due to ill health and had gone swimming with friends. “It was the theory,” the article reports, “that he had suffered from cramps in the water and his strength rendered useless.” Could the newspaper article have been part of a cover-up? That seemed unlikely, since the same newspaper had reported fearlessly on local corruption, including the gunfight mentioned above. So perhaps the sense of mystery surrounding Phillip’s death reflected nothing more than the bewilderment of a close-knit family losing a beloved brother.

Back in New Albany, Mississippi, the only reference to Phillip’s death, apart from his grave, is found in a file at the Union County Courthouse. Eleven days after the drowning, my grandfather, Phillip’s younger brother, Naum James who was not yet 21 years old, petitioned the court to be treated as an adult for the purposes of managing his money. The reason given for the petition was that he had “coming to him, by virtue of a certain insurance policy, above 1,000 dollars, in his own right.” The petition does not specify the nature of the insurance policy, but on the enclosing envelope is written “5/31” (the date of Phillip’s death) and “B. Gross, 112 Prospect Ave, Hot Spgs, Ark.”—the name and address of the funeral home that handled Phillip’s body.

If Phillip had taken out a $1,000 life insurance policy in favor of his younger brother Naum, then he quite likely had one of at least equal value in favor of his older brother Criss. It is therefore probably no coincidence that, the following year, the two surviving brothers purchased the restaurant where they worked and the surrounding land for $1,500. This was the first of several land and business transactions in Union and Monroe Counties, Mississippi, whereby the James brothers and two cousins established themselves in their adopted country. By 1923 they owned a city block next to the railway station in Amory, Mississippi, where they ran a hotel, a 24-hour restaurant, and a bakery. They managed these businesses until the last of the four men died in 1971.

Uncle Phillip thus kick-started his family’s prosperity through his own tragic and untimely death. No wonder his brothers remembered him with such reverence; his grave must, for them, have inspired a cocktail of emotions, ranging from the most profound sense of loss to the deepest gratitude. This is Phillip’s true legacy. In the end, his good-natured optimism proved justified for everyone except himself.

And the sense of mystery? Hard-nosed research dispels that—or does it? One of the witnesses for Naum James’s 1914 court petition was P. S. Johns, described in the petition as Naum’s uncle, but whose name appears in no family account. No Johns figures in any other court record in Union or Monroe Counties, nor does a Johns appear on any Mississippi census. But the 1920 census does show a Peter Johns, age 41, born in Macedonia; he is an inmate at the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. Maybe the sense of mystery I was feeling wasn’t solely related to Phillip. And perhaps that means my efforts were simply directed at the wrong uncle.

Mark James, who has no cousins, became interested in genealogy because his wife has 53 of them. He lives in New Zealand, where he claims to be the only Certified Genealogist in the southern hemisphere.