This genealogy book was the brainstorm of my cousin, Tom Brown, now deceased, who inherited a store of genealogy and research from his mother and my first cousin, Mary Margaret Phillips Brown. He invited me to contribute our Phillips line, and Tom’s daughter Cammy Thornton, with her technology expertise, brought our ancestors alive on a computer, ending with a data base of 2,300 names. The book involves many, many past and current residents of the New Madrid area.

To add interest to the genealogy, we included items such as archival photos, stories from the 1930s diary of my grandmother Neelie Waters Phillips, and tales from an interview with my mother Mildred Phillips Shy. Over a three-year period, using an early online internet service called Prodigy, we communicated, collaborated and engaged Kinko’s to publish our book. Later, Cammy transferred this book to a CD format, and it is still available electronically from the two surviving authors and the New Madrid Historical Museum.