Tag Archives: Hughes

Mapping My Family History: Tips and Tools

19 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by in DNA Matches, Genealogy, maps

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I took a week off from research for our 30th anniversary trip. It was nice to get away from the heat and life for a few days. We stayed at 1906 Lodge in Coronado and had our anniversary dinner at Kinme in San Diego. We wholeheartedly recommend both. We did a lot of site-seeing we hadn’t done in previous visits and even took in a bit of the Sunday outdoor pipe organ concert at Balboa Park. While we were walking along the beach after breakfast on our anniversary, we saw this sandcastle.

Now we are back home and I’m ready to get back to the research.

The local genealogical society where I live has Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that meet on a regular cadence. A new SIG that has formed is one for Artificial Intelligence. During our discussion, I mentioned I am wanting to create migration maps for my lines. A site that was suggested to me is TreeAlive.com. This site can do some interesting things, however, the migration map function is animated. I was hoping for something that is static that I can include in my manuscript. Doing a Google search, I ended up using My Google Maps and manually plotting the locations I wanted. This map is for my DeMoss line.

DNA Updates

  • KA, a distant cousin through Rebecca Wilks. This one isn’t going to be straight forward like I had hoped. It would seem that Mary Hughes, Rebecca’s granddaughter, and her first husband John W Kidd divorced in the 1890s. Both remarried before 1900. Mary claimed on the 1900 and 1910 census that she had nine children and all were still living. I’m having a hard time finding all nine children. Corah, Clara, and Ida were listed on the 1880 census and were married by 1900. Charles, born of her second marriage, was living with her in 1900. Mary was living with daughter Allie in 1910. Allie’s obituary names sisters Stella and Beatrice still living. Beatrice was living with her grandparents in 1900. That is seven children. This match supposedly connects through a son named Frank who was born about 1892.
    A bit of searching located an 8 year old Frank Kidd at Gordon Children’s Home in Shelby County, Indiana in the 1900 census.1 The birth month doesn’t match that of Mary and John’s presumed son, but that may not mean much. Mary and her second husband were residing in Rush County which is adjacent to Shelby County. The connection is starting to sound more plausible with this finding. Unfortunately, a biography on Mary’s father names her children and it doesn’t include a Frank.
    Another researcher has a Frank Kidd born in Indiana enlisted in the army in Ohio in 1910. Frank was listed as a soldier on his marriage record in 1918 in Alabama where he lived out his life. Frank died in 1953. His death certificate lists his parents as unknown which would be consistent with someone who was orphaned at a young age.
  • KD, a distant cousin through John Wesley Fielden. This one proved to be a bit easier to incorporate as her mother is already a DNA match in my tree.

Continuing Research on Benjamin Cox descendants: Emma Taylor Thomas and Millie Taylor Canada

I still have a few of Emma’s children to wrap up, starting with Anna Thomas Linthicum. Nothing too remarkable regarding Anna’s family. I still have not found much on Laura and Zelora. It appears that the family relocated between February 1902 and December 1903. Nothing appears in searches of FindaGrave and Newspapers between 1900 and 1910 for these names in Kentucky or Oklahoma. For all we know, they could have taken ill while in transit or succumbed to the measles outbreak that was reported around 1909. I don’t want to invest much more effort in this family unit and will move on to Millie Taylor Canada.

Millie and Ebben Canada had nine children, mostly sons. Nothing too remarkable was found so far on this family. I will continue with this family next week, picking up where I left off today on Home Canada Sr.

  • Jesse Cox + Mary Waugh > John Cox + Mary Parks > Louisa Cox + David Taylor > William F Taylor + Mary Lucy Pearson
    • Taylor
    • Temple
      • California: Marin, Sacramento
      • North Dakota: Stark
    • Canada
      • Oklahoma: Ottawa, Delaware, Craig
      • Kansas: Johnson
    • Burch
      • Oklahoma: Ottawa
    • Onions
      • Missouri: Jackson
      • Kansas: Johnson

Error Resolution

The last available update via Ancestry ProTools: I have 5077 errors in the tree–512 possible duplicates, 4110 with no documents, 455 other errors. My Ancestry error resolutions this week included:

  • Husband of a distant cousin needs source documents. I was able to add a few for him and for their three children who also needed records.
  • A distant cousin who needs source documents. I was able to update him and his siblings with documentation.
  • The husband of a 3rd great-grandaunt is in need of documentation. A few records were located for him.

Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 27,910 people
End of Week: 27,984 people
Change = +74 persons
Tasks for coming week:

  • Continue research on Isaac Cox, “The Immigrant” and his wife Susannah Tomlinson.
  • Review Coxes of Cox Creek
  • Run newspaper search, especially for articles recounting local history
  • Review the Cox package of information from Sweden
  • Look for documents in Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky
  1. 1900 US Federal Census, District 0102, Addison Township, Shelby County, Indiana, Sheet 5A, line 24. ↩︎

Zeresh Puckett

24 Sunday May 2020

Posted by in Genealogy

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Zeresh Puckett was born in Shelby County, Illinois on May 24, 1833, the daughter of Elihu Puckett and Rebecca Wilks.  She had an older sister Jamima and two younger brothers, Lewis and George.  Zeresh may also have had an older brother James Hughes from her mother’s first marriage.  Zeresh is a Biblical name from the Old Testament.

In 1836, Elihu and Rebecca moved the family from Illinois to Clay County, Indiana in the area served by the Coffee Post Office in Lewis Township. In 1853, Zeresh married Benjamin Coppock and they settled into farming in Lewis Township.  Zeresh helped support the family as a seamstress.  Later, Benjamin was employed as a grocer.

The couple had five children during their marriage: Jemima, Rebecca, Mary, Ida, and Thomas.  All lived long lives, reaching their seventies or beyond.   Zeresh, unfortunately, did not see her children to adulthood.  She died on February 27, 1873 at the age of thirty-nine.

 

Zeresh Puckett was my 3rd-great grandmother on my dad’s side

REFERENCES

  • United States Census: 1850, 1860, 1870
  • Find a Grave website
  • History of Clay County, Indiana, Volume II, William Travis, 1909.

Rebecca Hughes Puckett

28 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in Genealogy

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When I started working on tonight’s blog post, I was originally going to do a quick thing on the parents of Zeresh Puckett, my 3rd great grandmother who married Benjamin Coppock.  Well, that ain’t happening, at least not tonight.  The more I tried to make the pieces fit together, the more they fought back.  I wasn’t convinced that Rebecca Hughes Puckett was Zeresh’s mother.

In the 1850 Census, you can find Elihu Puckett (Zeresh’s father) in Clay County, IN as follows:

Elihu Pucket          41
Rebecca Pucket     41
Zerish Pucket        19
Lewis Pucket         15
George Hughes     14
James Sanders       6
Minerva Sanders    4
Godentia Sanders   1
Elias Pucket          19

If you aren’t familiar with census records, the immediate family is listed first in order by age, then extended family (siblings, inlaws, nieces/nephews, parents, etc) and other people like servants or boarders.  Keep in mind that 1850 was the first year they listed each person individually in the census, but yet they didn’t collect enormous amounts of information.  They didn’t start listing relationships to the head of the household until 1870 or 1880.

So, we have Elihu, his wife Rebecca, Zeresh, and Lewis which are all expected.  But then we have all these other people and no idea how they fit in the grand scheme of things.  My first inclination was that Elias Pucket is a much younger brother of Elihu.  Elihu’s mother died during the 1840s so that seemed logical and I set him aside.  The three Sanders kids were probably orphans of some sort so I didn’t worry too much about them, either.  That left George.  Let’s just say that George is an enigma and here’s why.

Puckett-Swickard Family Bible, courtesy of legacykwst on ancestry.com

Puckett-Swickard Family Bible, courtesy of legacykwst on ancestry.com

There is some question as to what Rebecca Puckett’s maiden name was.  Among the researchers who have posted their trees, there are about half a dozen different last names out there, including Hughes and Sanders.  At first I considered that Zeresh and Lewis were Elihu’s from a different wife, but the closeness in ages for George and Lewis bothered me.  I started looking at what other researchers had for sources and found a Puckett Family Bible posted by a user named “legacykwst”.  Rebecca was listed as Rebecca Puckett and no marriage date was listed in the bible for her and Elihu.  They were listed with four children, including a George Puckett.  So what is George’s real last name, Hughes or Puckett?

So I looked at some of the other documents that legacykwst had uploaded, and there were several pertaining to George trying to get disability as a result of the Civil War.  One in particular was a deposition of Aquillar Field in 1884. When Aquilla was asked what his relationship to George was, he responded, “My first wife is his mother.”  So, after checking a few things about Aquilla, I discovered he had been married at least twice–first to a Becky Hughes in 1840 in Vigo County and then to a Nancy Holliday in 1864.  Then I checked to see who was listed with him in the 1850 census and there was a Martha, age 30, and three youngsters with the last name of Field, probably Aquilla’s kids.  By 1860 it was just him several children…no Becky, no Martha.  So what happened to Becky?

After locating a biography on Lewis Field, one of Aquilla’s sons, in the History of Clay Co, IN by William Travis, I discovered that Aquilla’s first wife’s name was Martha Hughes, not Becky.  Maybe Becky was a nickname.  At any rate, I would suspect that George’s biological mother was Martha who had him out of wedlock at the age of 15 or 16.  Since that was a big no-no in 1836, she gave the baby to her older sister Rebecca to raise.

Lewis Field’s biography also mentions that Martha was born in Ohio, but documentation states that Rebecca was born in Kentucky.  Not a total stretch by any means, especially if they lived down along the Ohio River.  Also, some of the correspondence in legacykwst‘s possession mentions that the Field kids are cousins.  This helps to confirm that Martha and Rebecca were siblings.  Their father was John Hughes, who was a pioneer in Honey Creek Township in Vigo County.

So, with all that said, I think it is safe to say that Rebecca is Zeresh’s mother and her maiden name is Hughes.  She was born in 1800 in Kentucky.  She married Elihu Puckett and they lived in Shelby County, Illinois until 1836 when they relocated to Clay County.  They had three children–Jamima, Zeresh, and Lewis.  They also helped to raise a nephew, George Hughes, and other orphans in the area.  Rebecca died in 1862.