Great clip, Gris. Harry Groener was a big Broadway sta before Joss lured him away. When I heard he was cast in Buffy, my first response was "They have a song-and-dance man playing a bad guy? Huh."

Morgan Family Funeral, Volume 3, Chapter 2

Probably the coolest thing I found was a letter to Mimi's sister-in-law from Mimi's cousin:

Dear Juanita,

Sorry not to have answered your letter sooner.

Enclosed is the carbon of a letter to a Mrs. J.W. Meador, which I am also sending to William H. White on the same subject, as it explains everything.

I do not know our great-grandfather's name, the Choctaw in Mississippi and I hoped that Dorothy would. She wrote us earlier in the year that they could be out this way in June and Millie (my blue eyed squaw replied telling them to come stay with us. They haven't showed up so I presume that they are not coming.

How have you and Jim been doing? Fine I sure hope. As I remember, and have a picture of him, he is tall and slim & more so than any Meador than I can remember.

Maybe he knows the name of our Choctaw grandfather, and where Johnny Russell was buried. I think in either Lehigh or Atoka afther they moved from the T.A. Bryan farm where they lived next to us in the Indian Territory. He might know something of this related by his father, Uncle Johnny.

When I was a kid, Uncle Johnny used to tell me about going up the trail with cattle to Kansas and to Montana as the trail herd ironsmith, as blacksmiths were called in those days. In my mother's manuscript she describes coming from there to east Texas and then going to the Indian Territory. Johnny was then on a drive north and later joined them near Boggy Depot, I.T.

Uncle Johnny was the only one in the family who could speak a smattering of Choctaw, and I remember, "O, la amallie ga eh ah," which supposedly means, "Oh, what a mighty warrior was he."

Anything that Jim can recall that Uncle Johnny told him about the Meador family, please pass it on. Did you see in TRUE WEST the story by Charles McAdams (me) GHOSTLY HAPPENINGS AROUND OLD FORT WASHITA? Incase you haven't I am sending the mag under seperate cover.

Enclosed is this letter to a Meador in Mississippi

Your letter of June 24th has been sent on to me from the publisher of TRUE WEST. I am, of course, Charles McAdams.

The facts in GHOSTLY HAPPENINGS AOROUND OLD FORT WASHITA were told me many, many years ago by my grandfather, James Calhoun Meador, my uncle John Meador and my mother who was Susana Bell Meador.

My great grandfather Meador was at least a half Mississippi Choctaw Indian and probably a fullblood, according to what I can remember. He owned more than 1,000 acres of land around where Meridian and Tupelo Mississippi now stand and had 300 slaves when the civil war broke out. He also buried $800,000 in gold on which ever one was his 300 acre plantation. This was buried in several places but after the civil war he was so old and crippled up that he could never remember where it was buried.

What I am trying to find out is at which of those towns wa his home plantation and what his first name was. The oil fields, discovered many years ago, are on his old plantation lands.

The name "Meador" not Meadors or Meadow or Meadows, is of Choctaw Indian derivation, and it means a cultivated field. Anyone with the name Meador has to go back to the old war chief who was my great-great grandfather, who's name I haven't the faintest idea of. Nor of my great great grandfather.

My grandfather was James Calhoun Meador, a veteran of the civil war. He enlisted as a private but within a few months of the end of the war he was a major on General Lee's staff. However, there are no records [Actually I did find a James C. Meador- but with Moore not Lee] existing to show this. Promotions were fast and furious during the last gasps of Lee's campaing. He was out with a cavalry unit when Lee surrendered. On hearing this while returning to the command, he said boys, "Its everybody for himself now," and went home to Mississippi. He did not go in to get a Confederate Army discharge but did later from the state of Texas, which I have, and also his bible carried during the war, which he always called, "the (continued...)

( continues...) war between the states."

James Calhoun Meador married Francis Morgan [a distant relation of Grandandy's] (the niece of General Morgan) in Gainsville, Texas. He had the following children as I knew them, John, Rebecca, Laura who died at 19, Susanna Bell, and Charles.

John was the only one who could speak Choctaw. All of these people are long dead. Uncle John used to try teaching me Choctaw but I can recall very little of what he did teach me.

Uncle John had three children, John Russell who died about 1909, Kathleen who passed on sometime in the 1950's-I don't know when, but I grew up with these two in the Indian Territory. A third daugher, Dorothy Sanders still lives in Shreveport, Louisiana and there also resides his youngest son, J.C. Meador.

James Calhoun Meador (my grandfather) had a brother named John something or other, who never left Mississippi and he had a number of children, so I have been told.

Rebecca Meador King had a number of children, all of whom are now dead except Ethel Provost and Edith Jones, now living in California.

Charles Meador had two daughters. I do not know their names or where they reside today.

My mother had three children, me my brother who is county sheriff here, and my sister, who also lives in Flagstaff. She married into the Richardson-McAdams family, hence the name Charles McAdams, and all were pioneers in Arizona. They were Navajo Indian traders and I speak Navajo fluently, but not Choctaw.

Some time back I had a letter from Juanita Meador, the wife of my first cousin, James C. Meador [I'm not putting in the address]

She sent me a letter from William H. White, [another address] who was trying to trace his own family. He states that Mary Ann Tidwell married Joel Alexander Meador, who died in Wayne County Missouri, and that Joel passed on in Fisher, Lousiana.

Any Meador is a descendent of the original Meador Mississippi Choctaw family.

I would like to know the names of my great-grandfather, and that of my great-great grandfather Meador, but can get nothing out of the county recorders in Mississippi. I rather imaginegreat- grandfather's destroyed. However, there is a record of him in Mississippi as late as 1874, but5 I can't get any document on this other than the bare admissioin. This porbably comes from the fact according to my grandmother who did not die until about 1935, because the title to the oil lands was not clear.

Anything you might help me on straightening out the geneology of the Meador family would be greatly appreciated.

Both great-grandfather meador and great-great grandfather Meador supposedly served in the Choctaw-Chickasaw regiment during the war of 1812, but I can't get any documentary proof on this either.

Then on the back of a sheet of paper with Mimi's family tree listing Mary Puline Stelzer as her grandmother on her mother's side it says "Mary Pauline Stelzer's parents. Anna Elizabetin Stelzer- Came from Germany to be married to a man in N.Y. She met Christian Stelzer on the ship (3 month crossing) and married him instead. Christian left Germany to avoid serving in the military servis on ships he was a cabinet maker. His brother, Martin, was already in America and was an iron worker."

I am now in Orlando. Project number one is seeing if my luggage is too. Project number to involves my rental car.

Good luck and travel~ma ND!

I can't believe I am working on the show in five hours.

And you're 4 hours ahead of what you're used to right?

Damn du.de. Serious vibes your way

My body doesn't know what time zone it is in. This is my second trip out here in a week.

That sucks. Hey, don't you have a friend who was supposed to be working on a transporter? I haven't seen him around here lately.

I'm in my hotel room. I have a wake up call in 3.5 hours. Night all.