Place:Alexander, Illinois, United States

Alexander County has never adopted township form of government. The county has been divided into precincts, but until Precincts are added to the WeRelate Type menu, township is the closest approximation for these divisions.

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Alexander County is the southernmost and southwesternmost county in the U.S. state of Illinois. As of the 2020 census, the population was 5,240.^[1] Its county seat is Cairo and its western boundary is formed by the Mississippi River.

Alexander County is part of the Cape Girardeau, MO-IL Metropolitan Statistical Area which is made up of jurisdictions on both sides of the Mississippi River.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Alexander County was organized from part of Union County in 1819. It was named for William M. Alexander, a physician who practiced in the town of America (the first county seat). Alexander was elected as a representative to the state House, where he became Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives in 1822.

The county was initially developed for agriculture and settled by numerous migrants from the Upper South. The county seat was moved to Unity in 1833, then to Thebes in 1843, and finally to Cairo in 1860. America, the first county seat, is now within Pulaski County, which was formed from Alexander and Johnson counties in 1843.

Settled largely by white migrants from the Upland South, southern Illinois had many racial attitudes of the South. As African Americans settled in Cairo to seek jobs on steamboats, ferries, in shipping and railroads, there were tensions between the racial groups. White residents sometimes used violence and terrorism, as well as discrimination, to keep black residents in second-class positions. They excluded them from the city government and the police and fire departments, and relatively few African Americans were hired to work in the local stores.

There were three lynchings of blacks in Alexander County in the years between Reconstruction and the early 20th century. The county had the second-highest number of lynchings of African Americans in all of Illinois. The most notorious of these was the lynching of Will James before a crowd of white spectators estimated at 10,000, in the county seat of Cairo, Illinois on November 11, 1909. James was accused of murdering a young white woman. Later that same evening, the mob lynched a white man named Henry Salzner, hanging him in the courthouse square for allegedly killing his wife. Neither man had had a trial, nor was anyone ever prosecuted for the lynchings, even though Illinois had passed an anti-lynching law four years earlier.

Timeline

Population History

source: Source:Population of States and Counties of the United States: 1790-1990

Cemeteries

Cemeteries of Alexander County, Illinois, United States

Research Tips

Resources

• Outstanding guide to Alexander County family history and genealogy resources (FamilySearch Research Wiki). Birth, marriage, and death records, censuses, wills, deeds, county histories, cemeteries, churches, naturalizations, newspapers, libraries, and genealogical societies.
• Alexander County ILGenWeb

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog