Yesterday, when I was reviewing my information on Blanche Cox DeMoss Robertson, my great-grandmother, there were some questions raised.

1. My data said Blanche and Samuel I. DeMoss were married in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.  This concerned me because both were born in Knox County, and census records showed they settled in Knox and Greene Counties after they were married.
2. Blanche’s obituary listed a sister named Jessie, however, I had not located her in the census records or vital records.  I wasn’t sure when she was born or which of her father’s marriages she was a product of.

Blanche was born 1894 to Frank and Arabelle (McCullough) Cox in Knox County.  She had an older brother Raymond and three sisters—May, Anna, and Jessie—according to her obituary.  As of the 1900 Knox County Census, Jessie had not yet been born and Arabelle was still alive.

The Cox family had always lived in Knox County, but I had a 1910 Census record showing them in Cape Girardeau.  Blanche wasn’t listed with the family in the 1910 census.  She was found in another household working as a live-in maid in Cape Girardeau.  The census also listed  a woman named Mollie as Frank’s wife and that they had only been married 3 years.  So, Arabelle was gone and Jessie couldn’t be located.

A copy of Blanche and Samuel’s marriage license was indeed found in the Missouri marriages database. It was obtained on December 22, 1911 and filed on December 26.  What I am curious about is how did this marriage come about?  Samuel was about 5 years older than Blanche and the Coxes had moved to Missouri a good 4-5 years earlier.  Blanche wasn’t even 18 at the time of the wedding, so how did they get together?  Was this an arranged marriage or was he coveting her when she was 12?  At any rate, Blanche and Samuel returned to the Knox/Greene County area and went on with their lives, having four children, one of which was my grandfather Samuel T. DeMoss.  Samuel Isaac died in 1945.  Blanche married Coen Robertson before my grandfather died in 1955.  She died in 1965.

Jessie’s whereabouts were still a mystery.  I stumbled across another researcher’s data on Ancestry.com which referred to the 1910 census where she was listed as an adopted daughter of Charles and Anna Rogers in Westphalia.  Her birth was circa 1904 which would make Arabelle her mother, and most likely Arabelle died in childbirth.  Since fathers did not raise their infants back then, Jessie was given to someone else to raise; that someone else being the Rogers’.  Today I discovered that Anna Rogers was Frank’s sister, so Jessie was raised by her aunt and uncle. Yet another aunt and uncle, August and Emerine Cox Begeman lived in the next house down the road.  By 1920, I had lost Jessie again.  She wasn’t with the Rogers’ who had moved to Greene County, her sister Blanche, or the Begemans.

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Westphalia is just down the road from Edwardsport  in Widner Township, Knox County.