No, this isn’t about mowing the lawn at Magnolia, although I have undying respect for the people that regularly do this daunting chore.
Findagrave.com is the undisputed king of online cemetery websites. Their database has close to a quarter of a billion graves, and the database grows by five to ten thousand every day. It’s a superb example of crowdsourcing, and it can be a genealogist’s best friend.
Findagrave can also be a historian’s worst nightmare.
The Mississippi River is the single most defining element of Baton Rouge’s existence. Indeed, it’s likely that Baton Rouge—back to its Native American roots—would not have existed where it does had the Mississippi not flown past. It’s no accident that many of the world’s largest cities were built along navigable rivers, and Baton Rouge is no exception.
Like the city, the ships that have navigated the Mississippi have changed considerably over time. I chose these two photos because they were probably only taken 30 or 40 years apart, but they show two very different eras of Baton Rouge’s nautical ancestry.
