Phew! I think I'm done researching possible leads after all of that! If I can't track down her daylilies after such strong leads, then they probably don't exist anymore. Now to find a time in the future (hopefully the next month or two) to make some phone calls and try to save some historic cultivars from going extinct! Fingers crossed--wish me luck!

A few tidbits to add....

DogsNDaylilies said:Question to research: Who was "Fancher", and why is their last name tied to a few of Primos' introductions?

Mrs. R.T. Fancher, Jackson, Ms. is all that is listed in the hybridizer code for the name Fancher. Fancher - Primos is listed as Mrs. R.T. Fancher and Mrs. A.K. Primos.

DogsNDaylilies said:Contact info for Primos Café in Flowood and Ridgeland, Mississippi: http://www.primoscafe.com/
[b] strong lead?: restaurant website credits an "Angelo Primos"....could this be the "A.K. Primos" that Mrs. Primos was married to? (....need to re-reference Char's information here)
"Primos Cafe is a Mississippi restaurant tradition started by Angelo "Pop" Primos, a Greek immigrant baker.

Yes, I would say this is A.K. Primos, Angelo her husband. Did you find the article in the Summer 1967 DJ (vol. 21-2), pg. 14? That was the article I mentioned in the "wanted" thread and had some personal info in it about the Primos family.

DogsNDaylilies said:On a separate note, I need to research daylily Yazoo Mildred Primos, listed as hybridized by W.H. Smith (another case of female hybridizer listing under husband's name?....there was a 'Sheila Smith' daylily and 'Angie Smith' daylily hybridized by Mildred Primos.) This might be someone that Mildred gave/traded/sold her daylilies with.

From the code - Smith, W.H. is Mrs. W.H. Smith, of Satartia, Ms.
Info from a message in the AHS Robin Archives -
Ethel Barfield Smith, owned No Mistake Plantation.
She hybridized most of the Yazoo series of daylilies. She and her family were members of the Jackson Hemerocallis Society in the 70s through the early 90s.

Good Luck with the phone calls.

Char said:
Mrs. R.T. Fancher, Jackson, Ms. is all that is listed in the hybridizer code for the name Fancher. Fancher - Primos is listed as Mrs. R.T. Fancher and Mrs. A.K. Primos.

That's something, though! And it's a woman (that isn't Mildred), so that helps!

Char said:
Yes, I would say this is A.K. Primos, Angelo her husband. Did you find the article in the Summer 1967 DJ (vol. 21-2), pg. 14? That was the article I mentioned in the "wanted" thread and had some personal info in it about the Primos family.

I didn't, because I don't think the daylily journals are accessible to the public and I keep forgetting my darned login username for AHS! I wish we were allowed to choose our own, but I admittedly haven't looked into that possibility (if there is one) yet. I don't log in the AHS site except to update my membership, really, but I hope to change that in the future.

I figured out my login information though and I am currently looking through the different instances of "Primos" in the article. I may have to see if family members still live at the address provided (or if the daylilies still 'live' at the address provided!) About to read the article on her now...

Char said:
From the code - Smith, W.H. is Mrs. W.H. Smith, of Satartia, Ms.
Info from a message in the AHS Robin Archives -
Ethel Barfield Smith, owned No Mistake Plantation.
She hybridized most of the Yazoo series of daylilies. She and her family were members of the Jackson Hemerocallis Society in the 70s through the early 90s.

Good Luck with the phone calls.

Thanks!


Edited to correct quote formatting

....now I see why you were prompting me about whether or not I read the article...I would have saved myself some legwork if I had figured out my login info sooner and read it. It spells out the ties to the restaurant business in there. It also explains that she is of French descent, which may account for the French website which features some of her daylilies. I wonder if she had family in France that she kept in touch with that might have received some of her daylilies?...

still reading...

edited to add: It looks like the Belhaven College--now Bellhaven University--reference I saw earlier is more important than I realized at first. They may very well have some of the cultivars. I will have to contact them, for sure.

Is it possible that the garden in the right of this picture is the daylilies?: https://misspreservation.files...

@Char
@DogsNDaylilies

Thank you both for the interesting thread, the sharing of the puzzle and solution.

It IS interesting

DND you may also want to contact any Botanical Gardens in the area to see if she donated any to them. Lots of gardens like to have plants from local hybridizers. I know they do at the NYBG and also the NCBG. Not sure that they would give you some but at least you'd know that her cultivars are still in existence.

Yes, agreed! I'm actually in the process of asking myself to what extent to I want to go to try and save her cultivars? I don't have a lot of space for daylilies (and I've completely blown my daylily budget and then some), so do I want to try to take on all of her daylilies, or just the Baby Keith?

As I expressed to my husband yesterday, the tragedy of losing cultivars goes beyond simply losing the genetics. Yesterday my husband tried saying 'why don't you just find out what the [cultivars' parents] were and re-create the daylilies that she made?' I had to explain that, from a genetic standpoint, it would be like a human having a kid who passes away and saying 'let's just have another kid exactly like the first and give it the same name.'

Beyond the genetics aspect, there is a certain responsibility that goes along with creating a daylily with a particular name...daylily names can only be registered ONCE. If someone creates a cultivar with a cool name, and then lets it go extinct, no one can ever have a daylily with that name ever again. (Not officially, anyway.) If we don't track down her "Black Stallion," for instance, all fans of the book "Black Stallion" that would want a daylily to honor their book passion are SOL.

So....that makes me want to rescue all of her cultivars, somehow.

DND - This has been a sleuth mystery and a fascinating thread! Thanks for sharing your search and thanks to Char and others for some interesting leads! Pretty cool! I hope you are able to acquire some of her cultivars, starting with Baby Keith. I like the name Black Stallion too!

I contacted several people today....hoping I hear back from SOMEone tomorrow!

Remember The Black Stallion well, must have read it over 100 times as a kid. Seen the movie many times also.

Hope you hear something positive from someone! Have you tried contacting the AHS Archives and History Committee? Ken Cobb is the chair, [email protected] . I'm wondering if they might know if anyone has a collection of her plants.

No one has contacted me back yet, so I'm​ going to call/contact them again soon.

I will try Ken Cobb soon, too.

Quick update: A guy from Belhaven University called me back last week, but I was at work. I'd hoped to call him back on Thursday, which was supposed to be my day off, but I got sucked into working Thursday/Friday, so I didn't have a chance to call him back during normal business hours last week; and then, the last couple of days, I have had much bigger fish to fry than calling about daylilies. I'm hoping to call the man back tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed for me that he isn't put off by the fact that a it took me so long to get back to him.

I have not heard back from Primos Café/Mr. Primos.

I haven't called Ken Cobb yet, but intend to do so as soon as I get a chance.

This is the most amazing, fascinating thread! DND, a little unsolicited advice, and really, isn't that THE best kind? One reason you were put on this earth was to rescue her cultivars, you feel it in your bones, you have to, it seems so apparent to me. Go for it, don't get discouraged. If you need help from anyone here, say so, if there's anything that anyone could do to help out, I bet they would. This is bigger than all of us put together. We can't let people's good work disappear from the landscape (that was not meant to be a painful pun, it just came out that way!)

Abbey, thank you for the compliment and encouragement! I may need some help from southern gardeners, depending on what I find. I'm a northern gardener and some of Primos' southern-bred cultivars might not do so well up here. I know there are others here on the site that have special areas in their gardens for historical daylilies that may live in the warmer states and be able to help, but I'll have to cross that bridge when I get to it; for the moment, I need to simply find her daylilies, LoL!


UPDATE ON PROGRESS:
* I called the gentleman back at Belhaven University, but had to leave a message, so we are playing phone tag at the moment.
* I wrote an email to Ken Cobb, per Char's suggestion , asking for help and detailing what steps I have taken so far (so that I don't receive back a simple reply to contact the AHS region 14 people, a good suggestion Char made and I tried, but didn't seem to pan out due to lack of reply....I may try reaching out to them again if Ken and my other leads don't work out)

DND, now you have me all worked up!! What I know about gardening, you could fit in a fly's come si chiama, but research is more in my wheelhouse.

I can't help but think that something might open up for you if you researched the family, not having all the sources be garden-related. You could find people who had some contact with the family who have these daylilies in their gardens and don't think anything of it. You never know what family and family friends know or have.

I'm still not allowed to post links, you'd think they'd know by now I'm not a bot with a way to make a million dollars a month at home in my spare time, so let me try this: http:// static.clarionledger.com/contact/ -- one is the contact page of the newspaper in Jackson, the Clarion Ledger. They could very well be interested in your search, and if they do an article on it, that would do a lot of your legwork for you. At the very least, you could ask them to search their morgue for mentions of the family. Contact the newsroom, tell them you want to talk to features, and tell them what you're up to.

I've also gotten the contact info for the Archdiocese of Jackson. If someone is French, they could very well be Catholic, and those ties run long and deep even when people aren't serious or devout, especially if they're based in a town where the Archdiocese is located. They could at least help you with records of births, deaths, marriages, good way to find surviving relatives. http:// jacksondiocese.org/contact

And that site in French? Post in English, people in Europe speak multiple languages and don't get sentimental about it, and English, for now, is the language of commerce, so people who don't have it as a primary language, get it.

I don't want to annoy you, but this is how my brain works, I've worked as a journalist.

Abbey, thank you for the input! What an interesting take on the Archdiocese line of investigation. I will definitely keep that in mind.

As for the research on family and friends, I think I may have posted that on the previous page of posts, but there were definitely some leads. I found a Facebook page of one of her grandchildren and saw several children that are the namesake of some of Mildred Primos' daylilies, confirming that is her family member. I also tracked down one of her friends in the AHS, Ethel Smith, who owned the No Mistake Plantation (more on that in a moment) and who also named a daylily after Mildred Primos! One of those ladies (I'm forgetting which at the moment) created a daylily garden at Belhaven College, and so on... I also went down the route of looking up people for whom she named daylilies after because nearly all of her daylilies were named for family or friends. Some of those attempts at finding leads are mentioned earlier in this thread, too.


MINOR UPDATE:
I received an email from Ken Cobb --thanks @Char ! --and he told me he knew Ethel Smith and she seems to have bequeathed the No Mistake Plantation to her nephew, Earl Barfield, who is also believed to be deceased. Whether or not any daylilies remain on that plantation remain to be see. This might be a point where I could use help from someone on this site who lives near the plantation to call the realtor and schedule a 'showing' and find out discretely if the daylilies are still there (and labelled) or not, LoL! I don't know if there are any brave souls on this site willing to pose as a potential buyer of the property, though. (I don't want to be deceitful, but I also dont' want to tip off the realtor for fear that the realtor might refuse to 'waste' their time showing people the property just for daylilies or throw up some sort of red tape to prevent people from getting information. I just have a gut feel to be discrete at the moment since I don't know enough about the situation of the plantation or the owners.)

Ken Cobb also helped me with some other ideas and I am really impressed with the speedy and thorough response that he gave me! He seems like a great resource, whether he ends up helping me find the daylily(/ies) or not. I like him already.

Dnd, check out the photo gallery on this real estate page for No Mistake Plantation, there are daylilies in some of the pictures:

http://www.landsofamerica.com/...

Beautiful place! Makes me wish I was rich and looking to buy a plantation.

Did you watch the video too, Becky? I couldn't see any daylilies in it but it's quite interesting to watch:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...

Not sure if anyone mentioned it but there's a daylily called 'No Mistake Plantation' registered by Wild. Interesting where a simple question can lead!