Charles H. Gray
1934 - 2022

The Board of Directors of the Hancock County Historical Society and I welcome visitors and inquiries to the Kate Lobrano House. We are located at 108 Cue Street, directly across from the west side of the Hancock County Court House in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi. The society was founded in 1977 and its quest is to research and preserve the history of Hancock County.

Our headquarters, the Kate Lobrano House, is a delightful 1896 shotgun cottage that was donated to the society in 1988 by the grandchildren of Katherine Maynard Lobrano. Most of the original house is used as a turn-of-the-century museum, but a large addition to the rear provides office and storage facilities for research, lecture and social function areas. We seat sixty people at monthly luncheon meetings.

Our ultimate goal is to consign all the written documents on Hancock County history that we can gather into a database that will provide instant access to information being sought. To this end we have gathered records from churches, schools, newspapers, magazines, local authors, the city archives, the county and many other sources.

We have more than thirty thousand photographs of Bay Saint Louis, Pearlington, Logtown, Gainesville, Kiln, Ansley and the county in general. They are primarily late 19th century or early 20th century. 150 of them are framed and displayed on the walls of the Kate Lobrano House: the remainder is kept in our vault in albums, arranged by street address for easy access.

We do not keep records of any counties other than Hancock except those which were formed from Hancock, and only to the date of their formation: Harrison prior to 1841, and Pearl River prior to 1890. (Stone County was formed out of Harrison in 1916, but any records we have here pertain only to residents prior to Harrison’s formation in 1841.)

Please contact us by telephone, email or personal visit, if we can be of any assistance to you.

Sincerely,

Charles H. Gray
Executive Director