Hays-Ray-Webb Family Papers

Contents include the papers of Robert Berry Webb and Matilda Ann “Lit” Boyd Webb and their extended family.

The collection bulks with family correspondence documenting the activities of various family members. Included are letters of Matilda Webb’s parents, John D. Boyd (1800-1844) and Anna McKee Boyd Green (1804-1886), early settlers of the Standing Pine area, near Carthage, Leake County, Mississippi. John D. Boyd’s letters from Jackson document his service as a Mississippi legislator, business matters, and his death of smallpox, 1843-1844. The collection also bulks with antebellum and postbellum letters among family members, a great many of them letters from Sophia Boyd Andrews Hays and her siblings to their sister Matilda (Lit) Webb in Kosciusko, but also including letters to their mother Anna Boyd Green. The Civil War period is represented by 18 letters, some civilian. Among these are letters of (Anderson) Jack(son) Boyd, 13th MS infantry, Co. I (Minute Men of Attala), John Gordon D. (Gordon) Boyd, Co. E, 12th Texas Infantry Regiment (Young=s Regiment), James M. Boyd (Co. D, 40th Mississippi Infantry) and family members. Robert R. Boyd, 13th MS Infantry Co. I (Minute Men or Attala), wounded and disabled at Malvern Hill, is represented in letters to him and in the subject content of other letters.

Post-Civil War letters include letters of Robert Berry Webb to his wife during his travels and include letters of successive generations of the Webb and Boyd families, including Annie Webb Ray and her husband, Emmett Leighton Ray of Kosciusko. An unusual group of 29 letters were written to Lit Boyd by Sophia Boyd from Europe (1860, 1866-1868, and undated). Letters of “Cousin Wess” document family matters and his life while working for a sugar company in Cuba, 1929-1936. Other localities documented in the letters include Kosciusko, Sharon, Madisonville and Canton in Madison County (Mississippi), Moor’s Bayou, Tunica County (Miss.), New Orleans, and various localities in Texas and Cuba.

Other materials in the collection include diaries (two written in England and Scotland), primarily of Sophia Boyd Andrews Hays and her son Leon Sidney Hayes, who lived in Europe at times during 1860-1868. Kosciusko and Attala County materials include accounts, tax receipts, notes and other business and legal papers, county records and school records. Various newspaper clippings include obituaries and other family news items, Kosciusko news, and miscellaneous. There are a few tintypes and other photographs of family members.