In the years during and following the Civil War, my great-grandmother, Caroline Amanda “Lena” Frazier, and her younger first-cousin Lydia Tigner Noland grew up in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. The county seat, Woodville, had been the childhood home of Jefferson Davis. These two cousins were descendants and relatives of wealthy Mississippi plantation families–Tigners, Fraziers, Nolands, Ogdens, and McWillies. During their teenage years, women were sent away to private boarding schools. In their twenties, through relatives they met and married men of illustrious parentage with noted political and legal contributions to the states of Louisiana and Mississippi. Yet the two cousins lived their lives through the economic and social chaos of the post-Civil War South, struggling to maintain a semblance of their “blue-blood” heritage.