Monthly Archives: July 2025

2025 Week 30

27 Sunday Jul 2025

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I didn’t manage to do a lot of research this week. I was able to finish cleaning up the children of Andrew Jackson Ballard which I started last week. The family was quite prominent, with the children attending Yale, Vassar, and Cornell Universities. Charles and Samuel founded Ballard & Ballard Company, the flour mills which ultimately was sold to Pillsbury in the 1950s. Samuel served as lieutenant governor from 1919-1923. The youngest of A.J.’s children was Rogers Clark Ballard. He was a geological engineer, shrewd business man and held a significant interest in family history. He served as president of the Filson Historical Society for a number of years, a private organization whose mission is to preserve the history of Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley.

Barnett Ballard, the fourth son of James and Susannah, was accepted to the West Point Academy in 1833. A snippet of his letter accepting his appointment can be seen below.1 He died at age 17 while in service a year later.2

I am currently working on Bland Ballard, James and Susannah’s fifth son. He was appointed as a Federal Judge in Kentucky by Abraham Lincoln. I hope to have more on him and his family this week.

I should be able to get a lot of research completed in the coming week. It likely will not be concentrated on one particular family as I will be spending several days at the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City. There are several books with copyright restrictions that I want to get eyes on while I am there. I am super excited as this is my first visit to the family history mecca! I hope to have lots to report back on next week.

This week Ancestry gave me three new errors to resolve. I have 5251 errors in the tree–382 possible duplicates, 4264 with no documents, 605 other errors.

  • A 2nd cousin 2x removed that had a residence entry before she was born. This sometimes happened in my tree with the 1940 census when the census taker listed “same house” for location in 1935 on small children. I deleted the timeline entry and all is good.
  • A floater. This is likely someone whose connection to my tree was deleted because they were a distant collateral family. He has been deleted.
  • A 3rd cousin 1x removed that had two errors attached! Since she had no records or data listed, the program thought she was a duplicate with a sister. That was dismissed. The other error was no sources. It took quite a while to find a source for her. Her four siblings were easy to document, but this one, not so much. I finally found a clue in the marriage announcement for one of her sisters! I was then able to track down a marriage record which held a birthdate as well. Whew!

This week in the past…
I’d like to take an opportunity to celebrate the anniversaries of births, marriages, and deaths of my bloodlines the week ahead.
240 years ago – marriage of Therese Lefebre (6th ggm) and Jerome Creely (6th ggf)
163 years ago – marriage of Rachel Frost (3rd ggm) and Oliver McCullough (3rd ggf)
144 years ago – marriage of Sarah Winkler (2nd ggm) and Samuel T DeMoss (2nd ggf)
61 years ago – death of August Cardinal (ggf)

Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 27,596 people
End of Week: 27,609 people
Change = +13 persons
Tasks for coming week:

  • Focus on Susannah Cox + James Ballard, specifically son Bland Ballard
  • Review the information in The Other Polks to see if there is anything I don’t already have
  • Continue data mining on Ben Cox and Sarah Piety
  • Confirm the data from Polk Family and Kinsmen has been added for this family and page numbers are noted for easier citation adding
  • Review Coxes of Cox Creek
  • Review History of Mariah Creek Christian Church
  • Review bio of James Ballard, husband of Susannah Cox

  1. U.S. Military Academy Cadet Application Papers, 1805-1866, file 1832/086, Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  2. Register of Westpoint Cadets, 1803-1866, Ancestry.com. ↩︎

2025 Week 29

20 Sunday Jul 2025

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This week I have finished updating the children of William Harrison Ballard. I was able to fill in a lot of details for his seven children. Another researcher had a death date for Mary Ballard Jordan, however, I could not find any documentation to substantiate the fact. All I can be sure of is that it was after 1900 somewhere in Texas. Since her husband remarried in 1909, she likely died, but I cannot be certain.

There also was a bit of confusion with his son Andrew Jackson Ballard in the 1870 census. He was listed as Henry instead of Andrew which threw things off for a bit. I am now finished with this William Ballard and can move on to his brother Andrew.

While the Ballards and, to a lesser degree the Coxes, were prominent figures in the history of Kentucky, Andrew Jackson Ballard and his sons likely were the most prominent. AJ, a Louisville lawyer, served in the state legislature and was appointed by President Lincoln as the Clerk of the US District and Circuit Courts in Kentucky. His sons were prominent business men, having founded Ballard and Ballard Company in the 1880s, purportedly the largest flour mill in the world at one time.

Fun Fact!
In the 1930s, Kentucky baker Lively B Willoughby developed and patented an early version of canned biscuits. He partnered with Ballard & Ballard Company to put it in production. Ballard & Ballard was bought by Pillsbury in 1952 and they further developed the concept into the spiraled cardboard tube available today. In fact, my husband used those very canned biscuits yesterday when he made breakfast yesterday!

This week Ancestry gave me three new errors to resolve. I have 5284 errors in the tree–386 possible duplicates, 4289 with no documents, 609 other errors. These numbers were reported prior to my clean up efforts this week. I am anxious to see how things fared when the new numbers are posted for the upcoming week.

  • Johannes Braun, my 3rd great-grand uncle, has no sources attached. Unfortunately, I do not currently have the Worldwide subscription for Ancestry so I cannot link any sources for Johannes. I do not know if he migrated to the United States like his nephew Mathias. I will need to revisit this one at a later date.
  • A 3rd cousin 3x removed was entered twice, once under her maiden name and once under her married name. Simple merge to fix.
  • Joanna Bonnell, a 6th great-grandaunt, has no sources attached. I was able to find information in a genealogy of the Passaic Valley of New Jersey.

This week in the past…
I’d like to take an opportunity to celebrate the anniversaries of births, marriages, and deaths of my bloodlines the week ahead.
340 years ago – birth of Jacques Cardinal (8th ggf)
336 years ago – birth of John Quincy (8th ggf)
317 years ago – death of Anna Shepard Quincy (9th ggm)
227 years ago – marriage of Mary Hopkins (5th ggm) and Peter Carral (5th ggf)
172 years ago – death of Henry Thompson (4th ggf)

Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 27,866 people
End of Week: 27,596 people
Change = -270 persons
Tasks for coming week:

  • Focus on Susannah Cox + James Ballard, specifically son Andrew Jackson Ballard
  • Review the information in The Other Polks to see if there is anything I don’t already have
  • Continue data mining on Ben Cox and Sarah Piety
  • Confirm the data from Polk Family and Kinsmen has been added for this family and page numbers are noted for easier citation adding
  • Review Coxes of Cox Creek
  • Review History of Mariah Creek Christian Church
  • Review bio of James Ballard, husband of Susannah Cox

2025 Week 28

13 Sunday Jul 2025

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No, that’s not a typo. I took a week off and headed north to Alaska with the fam. Now it’s time to get back to work.

I’ve made some decent progress this week on my Ballards. I cleaned up Perlina Ballard Simpson Collings’ family information a bit, filling in some of the blanks. There was some interesting family dynamics going on there, especially after she married the second time. In 1850, the four older children from her first marriage were in her household, but the youngest who was twelve was living with Grandma Ballard. Perlina’s oldest two boys both died in their twenties. Joseph actually had a will and it gave the appearance that there was no love lost between the first family and the stepfather. Joseph’s will left everything to his full-blooded sisters and his mother and specifically stated that she was to have control of whatever he gave her, not her husband. Nothing was left to the half-siblings who were still minors in their own right.

The next two children of James and Susannah were Thomas and Sarah. Neither of them married. Little is known about Sarah’s death other than she was still a young woman. Thomas was listed as the head of household in 1850 with several family members residing with him, including his mother and Perlina’s youngest daughter Emma. Thomas died in his early 40s from a “painful illness”1. I haven’t located a will yet, although two of his brothers were tasked with managing his estate through probate.

I’m now working on son #3 William Harrison Ballard. He was actually married twice. His first marriage was short and resulted in no children. His second marriage to Mary McQuiddy was more fruitful with at least eight children born. As I am working through those individuals, I’m a bit frustrated with their son Barnett. Seems he married in 1886 and then he took off to roam the Great Plains leaving his wife behind. There were no children and she never remarried. It’s not clear if they ever divorced–at one time divorces in Kentucky required approval from the state legislature, and both identified as widowed in multiple census records. One newspaper article mentioned that he left for health reasons and he ultimately ended up in New Mexico and West Texas where it is much drier. For a period of time, he did serve as postmaster for one small town.

I also did some cleanup on my tree which explains why I had a decrease in people this week. When I am adding family members from an obituary, it is common for the wife to be listed without her maiden name. I have a bad habit of adding them with “?” as the last name. As you can imagine, I have a lot of women with the last name “?”. I decided to start working through this list and finding their last names. Mixed in with the wives of cousins are the mothers-in-law of cousins. These were added before I made the decision not to include the in-laws in my tree and they haven’t yet been cleaned up. So far I have sorted through the first names starting with “A” and I now only have 5 that I could not assign a last name. I’ve deleted about 150 people. I’ve also run a “floaters” report. It’s 18 pages long. I will be busy in my clean up efforts in the coming weeks.

And for good measure…don’t forget to back up your trees! If you have made a lot of changes, you may also want to go through a compacting process if your software has that feature. It’s been a while since I compacted my tree and it compacted more than 4%!

This week Ancestry gave me three new errors to resolve. I have 5281 errors in the tree–376 possible duplicates, 4299 with no documents, 606 other errors.

  • The first is the wife of a 6th cousin. She recently passed so I was able to add a few references for her.
  • A 4th cousin 2x removed that is a DNA match with no citations. Unfortunately not much could be found about this young girl.
  • A 2nd cousin 5x removed with no citations. I was able to find a couple of references for her.

This week in the past…
I’d like to take an opportunity to celebrate the anniversaries of births, marriages, and deaths of my bloodlines from last week and the week ahead.
405 years ago – death of Francoise Deschallais (11th ggm)
258 years ago – death of Colonel John Quincy (8th ggf)
237 years ago – birth of James Ireland (6th ggf)
201 years ago – death of James Shields (6th ggf)
174 years ago – marriage of Henry Thompson (4th ggf) and his 2nd wife Rebecca Beck
167 years ago – birth of Rebecca Coppock Mattox (2nd ggm)
161 years ago – death of Elizabeth Lowe DeMoss (4th ggm)
108 years ago – marriage of Zeda Mattox (ggm) and Frank Fielden (ggf)
60 years ago – death of Blanche Cox DeMoss Robertson (ggm)

Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 28,019 people
End of Week: 27,866 people
Change = -153 persons
Tasks for coming week:

  • Focus on Susannah Cox + James Ballard, specifically son William Harrison Ballard
  • Review the information in The Other Polks to see if there is anything I don’t already have
  • Continue data mining on Ben Cox and Sarah Piety
  • Confirm the data from Polk Family and Kinsmen has been added for this family and page numbers are noted for easier citation adding
  • Review Coxes of Cox Creek
  • Review History of Mariah Creek Christian Church
  • Review bio of James Ballard, husband of Susannah Cox
  1. Obituary, The Weekly Shelby News, 1 Dec 1852, page 3, column 5, newspapers.com. ↩︎