Monday Madness - Killed His Sister - Part 2

In a previous post, Monday Madness – Killed His Sister I shared a newspaper article about an incident in my family where a brother killed his sister. The newspaper article did not list the names of the children involved, only the father Luther Markham. Based on that article, I had previously searched for information about the family and asked questions of cousins. Nothing new was produced to add to the family tree.

Since I had so little information on this family, I decided to go back and re look over this family to see if I could learn something new. Well, the first task was to see if a death certificate could be found at the Mississippi Archives. I went back to the death index to see if I could find a Markham child who died close to the date of the newspaper article, 25 Jul 1918. Like my previous search, the death certificate for a Markham child was not found.

Knowing that the Markham surname has various spellings and in case I missed one, I decided to look at the index for the month of July 1918, in Lincoln County, Mississippi. Carefully scrolling through the microfiche, I found a death certificate of a five year old girl, dated 21 Jul 1918, who had died from gunshot wound to the chest. To my surprise, her surname was not Markham, it was Coleman.


The murdered sister’s name was S. A. Coleman. Now ain’t that a big help with her name. The death certificate named her parents as Luther and Eddie Roberts Coleman. If Luther is who I think he is, Luther is the son of my great aunt Amy Markham and her husband Anthony Coleman.

My need to document this family will keep me on the research road for awhile. Lets see where it leads.

More to come...

Part Three