It was an unusual mission that brought Ms. Jubal Frances Aline White and her husband all the way from their Texas home to the little Georgia town of Jeffersonville in the fall of 1969.

"I’m going to Georgia to look for a sea shell," Mrs. White told her neighbors in Arlington, Texas, before they left.

"A sea shell?" the neighbors asked. "Isn’t that a long way to go to look for a sea shell? There are lots of shells along the beaches right here in Texas, you know."

"But this is a special shell," Mrs. White explained. "It has been on my great-grandfather’s grave for more than a century, and now I want to find it and bring it back to Texas to put on his widow’s grave.

"Maybe it is foolish, " Mrs. White admitted, "but I want great-grandmother Missouri Whitehead to have the mourning conch on her grave now."

Mrs. White first heard the story of the mourning conch from her grandmother, Frances Whitehead Wente, who had watched Missouri Whitehead place the shell on her husband’s grave back in Georgia. As a child Mrs. White wondered about the story, trying to decide whether the shell really did exist or whether it was another of those "once upon a time" tales that her grandmother told so well.

She remembered being taken to the cemetery at Hemphill, Texas, and having an adult in the family point out the grave of Missouri Loyless Whitehead.

"That’s your great-grandmother’s grave", an aunt she could not remember which one said. "She came from Georgia to Texas after the War Between the States. Her husband had died, you know. Seems sad, her being buried here and him back there in Georgia. Right sad."

"Yes," another relative agreed, "but don’t forget that he has the shell. It keeps him company, you might say."

"I’d hate to have to depend on a shell for company!" someone else in the group said. "But then if you’re dead, I don’t suppose it matters."

"Grandmother Whitehead thought it mattered," the aunt retorted. "That’s why she left the shell, and that’s why she talked about it for as long as she lived."

So the story was true, there really was a shell, a mourning conch, on a grave somewhere in Georgia, the child, Aline, decided.

Aline moved away from her bickering relatives and strolled over to look at a stone angel, a baby angel with a short robe and stiff curly hair and heavy wings.

"Aline! Don’t step on the graves!" an aunt called after her.

So Aline carefully skirted each mound of earth and, though she was tempted, she took no shortcuts across the long stone slabs. She could not help thinking though how fine those smooth slabs would be for playing jacks or even for a game of hopscotch. The names and the dates carved on them would not interfere with the games, she thought, and she wondered if anybody ever played games in a graveyard.

After she had touched the wings of the stone angel, running her stubby fingers along the rows of granite feathers, Aline looked at the other grave markers: lambs, tree trunks, flowers, statues of Jesus. She went to look closely at those which interested her, still being careful not to step on the graves.

Nowhere in the whole cemetery did Aline see a grave with a conch on it, not a single one.

The grown ups were returning to their cars and were calling impatiently to Aline to hurry up. The child ran toward the road, and in her haste she stepped on the edge of a grave. Her foot sank through the crusty dirt and left a perfect print of her black patent leather shoe. Aline paused long enough to erase the print with the side of her shoe, stirring up a nest of ants as she did so.

Her path to the car led by her great-grandmother’s grave, and as she rant past it Aline said softly, "I’ll get you a shell, Great-grandmother, Missouri."

All the way home Aline thought about the shell. She closed her eyes so she could think hard, and the adults assumed she was asleep.

"The little thing’s all tired out. Probably needs a tonic," one of the women commented.

Aline kept her eyes closed. She often pretended to be asleep for she had discovered that adults talked of very interesting subjects when they thought she was not listening.

This afternoon though Aline was too deep in her own thoughts to pay attention to the conversation of her relatives. She was trying to remember the story of the conch, every detail, just as her grandmother told it………….

George and Missoouri Whitehead were married in Georgia in the 1830s. The young couple set up housekeeping on a plantation in Twiggs County near the town of Marion. Marion has now vanished, as have other landmarks in the area, but when Charles and Missouri lived nearby, Marion was a flourishing town.

It was in Marion that the Whiteheads bought the staple commodities they needed; sugar, coffee, wheat flour, and salt. Here, too, they frequently attended church services.

Macon, a real city, was not far away, but in those days a trip to Macon was a momentous event. Missouri had been to Macon on several occasions. Though she would have welcomed other trips there, she really wanted to go to Savannah.

Missouri had never seen the sea.

Charles had journeyed along the Georgia coast, and sometimes he would tell Missouri about the hypnotic sound of the waves hitting the shore and about how the water stretched on forever until it lost itself in the sky on the distant horizon. He told her, too, about the sea birds that flew low over the water and that patrolled the beach in search of food, and he described the shells that the waves deposited on the sands.

Once when he returned from a business trip to Savannah, Charles brought her a conch.

"Listen," he said, holding the big shell to her ear. "You can hear the sea roar. Listen."

"Is that how it sounds? Is it really?" Missouri asked delightedly. "If I close my eyes, I can pretend that I see the waves and the birds and the shells!"

At first Missouri used her shell as a doorstop in the parlor, as she had seen older ladies do, but the children were attracted to it, wanting to pick it up and listen to the sea roar, and she was afraid they would drop her treasure. Missouri put her shell up on the mantel out of their reach. She turned the shell on its side so that the pale pink lining showed. Often she passed through the room she paused to hold the shell close to her ear and hear its song.

The shell was still on the mantel years later when friends brought Charles’ coffin into the room and placed it near the fireplace. It was 1853, and Charles was 43. He had been ill for a long time.

One of the neighbors who came to sit up that night lifted the shell from the mantel, held it to his ear, and marveled at the sound of the sea. He passed it around the room to other friends who had come to share the vigil.

Missouri wanted to snatch the shell from them, wanted to shout, "That’s mine! Mine and Charles’! Don’t touch it!" But she knew they meant no harm, so she controlled her tongue, and when someone asked where the shell came from, she answered simply, "Mr. Whitehead brought it to me."

After he husband’s death, Missouri ran their plantation alone. Her growing sons and the hands Charles had trained helped, of course, but Missouri was in charge. She always was.

Then came the War and the bitter time of Reconstruction. One of Missouri’s sons gave his life for the service of the Confederacy. His death was the family’s greatest loss though their plantation was devastated, their slaves were gone, and their money was worthless.

"You don’t grieve, you work," Missouri said when she talked about their losses. The truth was, she had never quit missing Charles, had never recovered from that loss.

Talk of Texas and the opportunities in the developing state interested Missouri, and she sent a son, Henry, to investigate.

"Come to Texas," Henry wrote back to Georgia to his mother. "Land is plentiful and it’s so rich it will grow anything. And it’s cheap."

So Missouri Whitehead sold her Georgia land, hid her money in a belt strapped around her tiny waist, and took her family to Texas.

It was difficult for Missouri to leave her home and her friends in Georgia, but the hardest part was having to pay a final visit to her husband’s grave. She knew she would never return. On that last visit, she took the shell, the conch Charles have given her, and placed it on his grave.

"Listen, Charles" she whispered, "and you will hear our shell singing a perpetual reminder of my grief and of my love."

She pushed the shell firmly into the dirt, and then she walked rapidly away. Somehow the act comforted her for she felt that Charles knew the shell was on his grave and that he understood and was less lonely.

It was this story that Aline Ragan (later to be Mrs. G. A. White) reviewed in her mind as she rode home from her great-grandmother’s grave that afternoon, and it was this story which prompted her years later to look for the shell.

Her husband went with her to Georgia to help in the search. Though he understood her motivation and was quite sympathetic, he was not optimistic that the mission would be successful. He tried to prepare Ms. White for possible disappointment by reminding her that they had only vague directions for locating her great-grandfather’s grave. Even if they found the grave, he pointed out, the chance that the conch would be still where Missouri Whitehead had placed it more than a century before was small indeed.

For almost two days after they begin their search for the grave site, it appeared that Mr. White’s predictions were correct. Although they inquired of local residents in Twiggs County, checked records, and rode hundreds of miles on rural roads, they did not find the private cemetery in which Charles Whitehead was buried.

Then, late in the afternoon of the second day, October 12, Mr. and Mrs. White found the burying place. It was in a field near the road, not far from Bullard. A rusty iron fence with sharp pickets separated the graves, perhaps a dozen of them, from the cultivated acres, and a decaying oak tree shaded them. Though it was almost mid-October, there had not been a killing frost, and the graves were covered with a tangle of vines and weeds.

The couple pulled the iron gate open and entered the enclosure. They could see the inscriptions on some of the markers, and one of them bore the name they sought.

"Perhaps it was too much to hope that we could find the shell after all these years," Mrs. White said, but her husband was too busy pushing aside vines and tramping down weeds to hear her.

Then they saw it, the spiked crown of a weathered conch protruding from the Georgia earth.

Neither of them spoke for a second. Then Mrs. White exclaimed, "That’s it! The shell, it’s really here!" She stopped and reached for it and then drew her hands back.

"No," she said, "let’s not disturb it now. We will leave it right here until tomorrow. Then we’ll bring someone with us to verify our find."

Next day, October 13, Mrs. White went into Macon to do some historical and genealogical research, leaving Mr. White to go for the shell in the company of Hugh Lawson Faulk of Dry Branch, GA and a Mr. Sanders who was a neighbor of Mr. Faulk. With them was the Faulk’s hired man, Lewis Williams.

Lewis Williams was leaning over to lift the shell from the grave when Sanders asked, "where did that strange looking goose come from?"

Walking along the side of the fence and pecking in the grass growing there was a big blue goose. The bird seemed to be quite at ease, not at all perturbed by the presence of the four men. It actually seemed to be watching what the four of them were doing.

"Where did it come from?" one of the men asked. "It wasn’t here when we came, and none of us saw it come. That’s strange."

"I don’t know where it came from, but I do know that I never saw goose like it before," Faulk said. "I’ve lived around here about all my life, but there has never been a bird like that here."

"Maybe I can catch him," Williams volunteered. "Mrs. White would like to take a goose like that back to Texas with her."

"All right," Faulk replied. "You catch the goose, and I’ll get the shell."

Williams moved slowly toward the beautiful bird so as not to frighten it. The goose seemed to be almost tame, and he gazed calmly at the stranger moving toward him. However, just as Williams reached out to grab the goose, a pickup truck rattled down the road past the cemetery, and the noise startled the bird to flight.

At that very instant Faulk lifted the shell from Charles Whitehead’s grave.

The goose circled slowly over the cemetery, flying low, and then flew due west toward Texas. The four men watched the great goose until it was out of sight.

Then they brushed some of the dirt from the shell, carefully wrapped it in paper, and went to deliver it to Mrs. White.

With the shell they brought the story of the blue goose, the unusual bird that had watched them take the shell from Charles Whitehead’s grave and, after the shell had been removed, had flown westward.

"Do you suppose….No. No. It couldn’t be….But I do wonder," Mrs. White said, half to herself, when their story had ended.

She wondered more about the strange bird when she returned to Texas and heard a story from her niece, Mrs. Eloise Ratcliff Adams, great-great-granddaughter of Missouri Loyless Whitehead.

Mrs. Adams lived in Glen Rose, Texas, at the time. On October 15, two days after the blue goose had circled Charles Whitehead’s grave in Georgia and had flown westward, Mrs. Adams’ thirteen year old daughter called to her from the yard.

"Mother! Come out quickly! There’s a beautiful bird out here, a big one. Hurry!"

Mrs. Adams ran from the house and into the yard, and together she and her daughter watched a big blue goose, the first one either of them had ever seen, circle low over their house. Then if flew away, straight in the direction of Hemphill, Texas.

Mrs. White wondered about the bird as she took the conch to the cemetery at Hemphill and placed it on great-grandmother’s grave.

"I know Charles wanted you to have the shell now" she said. "He sent it with his love."

There is a new conch affixed to Charles Whitehead’s gravestone in Georgia, and the old shell at Missouri Whitehead’s grave in Texas has a small marker reading, "To Missouri with Love from Charles."

The story of the conch is a treasured part of the Whitehead family tradition, and it is told and retold at family gatherings. Now this telling includes an account of a strange bird, a blue goose, that watched the removal of the shell from Charles Whitehead’s grave and then flew halfway across the continent toward Missouri Whitehead’s burial spot.

And they wonder, the people who tell the tale and the people who listen, if the bird took a message to Missouri Whitehead that her shell had been found and was being brought to her to sing for her an eternal song of remembrance.