A few years ago, Rivers Phillips was digging through the pockets of a suit that had been donated to the Mid-Delta Arts Association.
It was a unique ensemble that had obviously been stitched for a very small-statured man.
“I had picked up this suit numerous times before,” Phillips said.
The suit was going to be worn by an actor in the theater’s production of Bye Bye Birdie, and she was preparing to take it to the cleaners.
But she could not stop digging in those pockets.
Before long, she discovered several relics from the 1930s and 1940s, including two silver certificates.
Then she made an even more incredible discovery.
“I found two Gold Star pins pinned inside of the breast pocket of that jacket, inside the liner,” she said.
The name attached to those pins was familiar.
The man – long deceased – and Phillips had never met in life.
His grave, however, is one of hundreds that Phillips has documented and marked at Indianola City Cemetery.
She knew exactly where he was buried, and she even knew some things about the man’s family, including that his widow lived to be over 100 years old.
At some point, his clothes were donated to the Brindley Theater. The family has since moved off, leaving Phillips with those mementos.
“I’d love to return it to somebody in the family,” Phillips said. “I’ve just got to find them. They were there for a reason.”
It’s just one mystery among dozens that Phillips has encountered in her mission to document veterans’ graves. She has located over 1,300, she said, at Indianola’s cemetery and in Moorhead, Caile and Sunflower.
Phillips has helped to solve many of those mysteries over the years, starting at the graves themselves, and using tools like findagrave.com, ancestry.com, newspapers.com and other websites.
This journey began in Mississippi over 20 years ago, when she was pregnant with her son, Schiefer.
After meeting her late friend, Sis Robinson, she had become interested in joining the Daughters of the American Revolution.
In order to join the DAR, Phillips had to have an open lineage to a veteran of the Revolutionary War.
With roots in Ohio, Crawford County in fact, Phillips had always heard when she was growing up that she was a descendant of Colonel William Crawford, who had served with George Washington.
She started her lineage paper from scratch, and when she completed it, she sent it off, only to receive the news a few weeks later that “the line was closed.”
Phillips knew that there was something wrong, and it was not on her end of the genealogical research.
“I knew I was right,” she said. “They wouldn’t open it.”
But Phillips was determined to prove that the line should have been open.
It took her 10 years, and a lot of traveling to county courthouses in Ohio, but she was proved right.
“I am screaming at the end of the driveway, because I got it. They opened the line,” Phillips said.
During Phillips’ journey to find her own history, she met the late Sonya Fox, and the two would travel to area cemeteries to mark veterans’ graves for the DAR.
Phillips had visited many cemeteries in her youth when her mother and grandmother took her along to find the graves of relatives, but her experience with Fox was different.
There was almost no terrain Fox, who was up in age at the time, would not tackle.
On one occasion, at a cemetery in Sunflower, Phillips said that Fox was determined to mark the graves of two World War I veterans.
“She began moving trees,” Phillips said. “They were large branches, but they might as well have been trees. Here I am, afraid of snakes.”
Fox made a big impression on Phillips, and she channels that same fire and determination when she continues to mark graves these days.
This has become a calling for Phillips, who says that even with decades of walking Indianola’s hallowed grounds, she is nowhere near finished marking all of the graves.
“One year, I think that I found 80 that weren’t marked, that were not new people,” she said. “They were older people.”
Over the years, she has taken Boy Scouts to the cemetery to assist with planting small American flags beside the soldiers’ graves.
These are solemn occasions, where she has the opportunity to tell some of the stories of the people who are buried here.
There’s a headstone for a young man who went off to fight, and his ship was sunk.
“He didn’t come home, and he’s not here either,” Phillips said. “This is a stone that the community put up for him. His body is not here. He’s in the ocean.”
The freedoms that Americans enjoy, Phillips tells the Scouts, come from that man’s sacrifice, along with hundreds of others in the cemetery.
Through her mission, Phillips has been able to help many people across the country, and even the world, locate graves of relatives and other interested parties.
In one instance, documented in The Enterprise-Tocsin last year, Phillips was able to connect an artifact hunter in Italy with a local family. He had found the dog tags of an Indianola soldier who had apparently dropped the dog tags in Italy during World War II.
Sometimes, though, the greatest reward is simply taking a photo of a grave and posting it to findagrave.com for a relative who is far off and is unable to visit the cemetery.
Her use of newspapers.com has shed light on many of the lives of the people who are buried in the local cemeteries.
And there are those mysteries, hardly a one Phillips can shake once she finds them.
There was a headstone that merely identified a woman as “Sarah Blanche.”
“I knew that I had to find her,” Phillips said.
It took her eight years, but she was finally able to connect a small clipping from on old Memphis Commercial Appeal article with the family plot where she is buried.
There’s another one that nags at Phillips.
The headstone simply reads, “In memory of Emily, wife of…and the stone got broke,” Phillips said.
“I can’t find who she was,” she said. “Every year, I revisit that, and I say I’m going to find Emily.”
Then there’s the story of an African American Confederate soldier named William Gant, who is apparently the only known African American buried at the city cemetery.
His grave is not marked, but Phillips has been able to piece together a lot of Gant’s life that led to him coming to Indianola after the war.
According to newspaper articles, he owned a restaurant in downtown Indianola, called Bivouac, which catered primarily to a white clientele.
Gant was so popular, according to one article, that the governor of Mississippi participated in his funeral at the cemetery when he died around the turn of the 20th century.
Phillips has not confirmed where Gant is buried, but that is one of her projects.
Those stories and others are what keep Phillips going back to cemeteries, both locally, in other states and even in other countries.
But locally, the main drive is the veteran markers, something she will continue to do as long as she is able, she said.
“It’s a lot of work, but I enjoy it, so it’s not really work,” Phillips said.
This coming Veterans Day, Phillips will bring her American flags back to the cemeteries, and she will inevitably discover that she needs more, some for new graves, and some that she might have missed along the way.
“I always get the feeling that I’ve missed somebody,” she said.
It’s certainly not for a lack of trying.
If they are out there, Phillips will find them. It’s her mission, and she’ll stop at nothing to fulfill it.
