Six generations, from the pine and cotton country of southwest Mississippi to everywhere the branches reached. Tap any name to read their story.
Son of Edward Crossley of Amite County and Victoria “Queenie” Wells of Pike County — and, if the new lead holds, grandson of Samuel R. Crossley Sr. of Liberty. He was a sharecropper who became something rare for a Black farm man of his time: an entrepreneur — a crew leader who organized and transported migrant harvest workers across the country, one of the few independent livelihoods an economy built on the furnish system allowed. He died at harvest's end, October 31, 1956, just fifty-one.
A measure of his standing in the wider family survives in a name: when Narcis Bailey's last child was born in February 1934, four months after her father's death, she was named Eddis Mariah — Mariah for her grandmother, and Eddis, her nephew Willie L. Robinson later wrote, most likely for Eddie Alforence, her Aunt Modessa's husband.
She was the anchor. Nearly twenty-one years a widow, she raised the family's values into a second and third generation — and one day, with no formal plan, called her children home to Mississippi under one roof. That gathering became the family reunion, now nearly fifty years running. She died August 20, 1977; they rest together at Rocky Point Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery, Summit.