With a long holiday ahead of me, I’m digging into who Benjamin Cox was as a person. This requires me to incorporate the history of the places where he lived and how he might have contributed.

First order of business was to map out where Benjamin resided throughout his life. He was born in Hampshire County, Virginia about 1757. Since this is pre-Revolutionary War Era, the Colonies were expanding and counties were being organized. To keep up with the rapidly changing boundaries of these government units, I found a really cool website that includes interactive maps of the states: Maps of US. I whole-heartedly recommend you check it out if you are exploring how boundaries changed over time.

My second task was to reread Evelyn C. Adams’ “The Coxes of Cox’s Creek, Kentucky”. Mrs. Adams provided footnotes for her article on the Cox family which led to some additional references I had not considered. She mentioned that Benjamin and his brothers often served in various capacities in the community when they were residing in Yohogania County. As luck would have it, the Minute Book of the Virginia Court held for Yohogania County, 1776-1780 is available digitally on FamilySearch.org. I am sure I will reference it often, especially while researching the next generation of Coxes.

There was mention that a Benjamin Cox served on a jury in May 1778. It is not clear if this was my Benjamin Cox or his older cousin. If it was my Benjamin, this would support a birth of 1757 or earlier, not 1765 as family lore would suggest.

Taking into account the boundary changes during this time period, a full text search of FamilySearch for Washington County, Pennsylvania, did not produce any documentation for Benjamin prior to 1780. Jefferson County, Virginia/Kentucky after 1776 was nearly as fruitless with one deed transfer. A search of Nelson County, however, was quite bountiful. One of the earliest documents was from a tithable tax list from 1787.

References identified in Kester’s The Other Polks included manuscripts and papers in the Rogers Clark Ballard Thruston collection, a descendant of Benjamin and Sarah. Unfortunately, those do not appear to be digitized at this time so a trip to Louisville to visit the Filson Club is now on the genealogy bucket list.

---

On some of the genealogy groups, I’ve been hearing about NotebookLM, a Google AI application. Since I am currently in a writing phase, I thought I’d try it out and see if it is something I want to maybe use. I’m not sure I want to go back and rewrite everything I have already put together, but maybe it can wordsmith things a bit better going forward.

I keep a folder for each set of grandparents on my computer. In it are copies of vital records, census records, draft cards, newspaper clippings, and tombstone photos. One thing I haven’t been including in these folders are excerpts from books. I keep the books elsewhere. To try out NotebookLM, I started a new notebook and uploaded all the documents from my grandparents’ folder. The app initially spit out a one paragraph summary of what I had uploaded, hitting some highlights. I then tried out some of the other features the application boasts in the Studio.

• Flashcards – This tool created a series of flashcards with facts about my grandparents such as where was Edeine born, etc. Not necessarily a useful feature for genealogy, but possibly would be for other subject matter. This might be useful for a student studying for an exam.
• Mind Map – This tool broke the main topic into a handful of subtopics and continued to drill down within each layer to more detail. This might be useful for organizing facts into categories for later presentation.
• Audio Overview – This is a narrative with commentary breaking down the subject matter in the the source documents. In this case, my grandparents lives. It incorporated current events at the time and gave color to what might be otherwise a boring stack of documents. There is a limit of three of these that can be generated each day.
• Reports – This tool can generate several kinds of reports depending on the angle you want to project. Do I want to focus on my grandfather or my grandmother? Do I want a summary or a blog post? Lots of options here.

I thought the audio overview was rather cool. It brought some perspective to events of my grandparents’ lives. The fact that they married young at the end of the Great Depression. Their first child died after only a few weeks. My grandfather escaped with his life from a coal mine explosion. A discussion as to why he might have needed to do coal mining in addition to farming. The financial impact of having a large family. My grandmother’s resiliency of being a young widow with a passel of children to support.

Initially I didn’t include birth certificates for all of their children. I still don’t have anything in the source stack for my aunt who is still living. The written reports are riddled with errors, but at least those can be manually fixed if I were to use those reports in any way. You are limited to 100 notebooks and each notebook is limited to 50 source documents that can be included. The test runs I did used about half that. I’m curious to try out the Infographic and the Slide Deck, but those features were not active today. I am likely to utilize this set of tools to enhance my biographical writings, but I will continue to do the writing myself.

---

3 Error hints to resolve. The last available update: I have 4926 errors in the tree–368 possible duplicates, 4102 with no documents, 456 other errors.

• A distant cousin with no sources attached. Found her with her parents in the 1860 Census.
• Another distant cousin with no sources attached. I probably won’t find anything for this individual since he likely just graduated from high school.
• Last is a stepson of a distant cousin. I was able to find a birth record for him.

---

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 the week ahead.
264 years ago – birth of Therese Lefebre (6th ggm)
230 years ago – marriage of Martha Smith (5th ggm) and Reuben Staton (5th ggf)
182 years ago – marriage of Oliver McCullough (3rd ggf) and his first wife Eliza Grimsley
133 years ago – marriage George W Winkler (3rd ggf) and his second wife Katie Bean
88 years ago – death of Samuel T DeMoss (2nd ggf)
10 years ago – death of Dorothy Cardinal Keller (gm)

---

Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 27,007 people
End of Week: 27,008 people
Change = +1 persons
Tasks for coming week:

• Write the biographies of the family of Benjamin and Sarah Piety Cox.
• Review the information in The Other Polks to see if there is anything I don’t already have.
• 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

---