So this week I’m getting my bearings on Shelby County, Kentucky. It is east of Louisville. Biographical accounts for Benjamin and Sarah state they lived near Bullskin Creek. Tax records confirm Bullskin Creek was the water source for their land. Information on Find A Grave state they are buried in the Cox Family Plot which was on the family farm. The physical location for the farm is identified as 5 miles west of Shelbyville and 1 mile south of the turnpike. Since there are no true turnpikes (toll roads) in Kentucky at this time, it is either 1 mile south of US 60 or 1 mile south of Interstate 64. Bullskin Creek runs north-south under both highways.

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As I was transcribing Benjamin’s will, there were several entries that bequeathed a monetary gift to some of the heirs. It was specifically worded as “the sum of one hundred dollars in specie”. So what is “specie”?

Historically, specie money was primarily composed of gold and silver coins, valued for their intrinsic worth as precious metals. 

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I started reviewing the information in “The Coxes of Cox’s Creek, Kentucky” by Evelyn Crady Adams which was published in Genealogies of Kentucky Families in 1981. It is available on Ancestry and it does have citations which I appreciated. In this read through, I was especially interested in clarifying the timeline of life events for Benjamin and Sarah. I was and am still not certain that they were 16 and 14 when they were married ca 1783, as is the claim in Polk Family and Kinsmen which was published in 1912 and does not have any citations. I have as yet to find a marriage record for them.

Accounts in both manuscripts give similar stories of how the Coxes and the Polks/Pietys arrived in the same general location. Each family had its own “station” or stockade and were only a few miles apart. It’s not clear where the Pietys were living in 1782 when Kincheloe’s Station (formerly Polk’s Station) was raided and burned by Indians.

While I was poking around on FamilySearch looking for something to answer all these questions I have, I did come across a reference to a three volume set of books about Charles Polk, the Indian Trader and his descendants. The first volume specifically called out the descendants of his daughter Sarah Polk Piety, mother of Sarah Piety Cox, so I was intrigued. Written in 2019, I was hoping to find an electronic version. It is available in print, but only known to be in a few select libraries, nowhere near me. Considering the cost of traveling to one of those libraries would exceed the price of the three books, I bought the three books. Now I wait for them to get here. I hope it is more up to date than the 1912 family history.

Until I get my books, I’ll start documenting Ben and Sarah’s children.

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This week Ancestry gave me three new errors to resolve. I have 5268 errors in the tree–372 possible duplicates, 4290 with no documents, 605 other errors.

• A 6th cousin DNA Match on my Cox line. She’s probably about my daughter’s age so I don’t know how much I’ll be able to find.
• This one was a bit of a challenge, but I finally got a first name and a source for the 3rd husband of a 5th cousin.
• Here’s one I haven’t come across before. When I added the 1940 census data, it also had a line item for residence in 1935. Only problem with that is that this person wasn’t born until 1939. This was for a husband of a 4th cousin 1x removed. All fixed now.

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This week in the past…
I’d like to take an opportunity to celebrate the anniversaries of births, marriages, and deaths of my bloodlines which will occur during the week ahead.
277 years ago – birth of George Catt Sr (6th ggf)
275 years ago – birth of Philip Catt (7th ggf)
250 years ago – birth of Thomas Johnson (5th ggf)
209 years ago – marriage of Elinor Johnson (4th ggm) and Francis Roderick (4th ggf)
206 years ago – marriage of Rebecca Wilks (4th ggm) and her first husband James Hughes
188 years ago – birth of Robert C Thompson (3rd ggf)
160 years ago – death of Michael Keller Jr (4th ggf)
137 years ago – marriage of Arabelle McCullough (2nd ggm) and Frank Cox (2nd ggf)
76 years ago – death of Magdalena Keller Kaiser (2nd ggm)

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Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 27,871 people
End of Week: 27,883 people
Change = +12 persons
Tasks for coming week:

• 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