This week I’ve been doing a little of this and a little of that. I took some time one evening to delete some floaters. When I finished, I think it said I deleted well over 100 people! Another night, I cleaned up a few place names. Housekeeping in my tree is an enormous task that will take years to fix.
Aside from those activities, I have started researching Jonathan Piety Cox and his family with Rachel Tigert. Marriage license documents for this couple indicate that Rachel was over twenty-one, however, Jonathan was not and there is written permission from his father for him to wed.
I was unable to find much of anything on Tigerts in the Shelby County area at that time. Broadening my search to all of Kentucky, I did find a will for John Tigert in Warren County, Kentucky in 1820. A Jonathan Cox served as witness to the document. What are the chances that Gabriel’s brother Jonathan (husband to Rachel) is the same man? There is a bit of distance between Shelby County and Warren County, but I don’t think this is too far of a reach. While Mr. Tigert’s will did not specifically name his daughters, he did state he had five of them. The image below appears to be the actual document and not the transcribed copy in the clerk’s book.
A little further digging, and I found an alternate spelling of “Tygart”. John and Isabel were possibly married in Washington County, Virginia in 1800. This would not be consistent with Rachel being their daughter and of the age of 21 in 1817 at the time of her marriage. I guess she could have lied to the clerk. Other documents I found with the spelling Tygart did identify John’s five daughters by name, one of which was Rachel. Unfortunately, her married name was Simpson, not Cox, and the deed stated she resided in Warren County. What I did notice in the Washington County marriage records was the marriage of John’s brother James in 1796. Is James possibly Rachel’s father? At any rate, this has been a bit of a rabbit hole for me. If there are any Tigert/Tygart researchers out there and have an answer or just a theory, I’d love it if you would share.
I did manage to work through the family of Jonathan and Rachel’s first born, James. James married Christiana Polk in Knox County. They were slightly distant cousins. He left her a widow with four young children around 1849 or so. She remarried a couple times. What I am finding is that a portion of Jonathan and Rachel’s descendants migrated away from Indiana and landed in southeast Kansas, not far from Joplin, Missouri. At any rate, I will be working on their second son next week, Benjamin F Cox.
This week Ancestry gave me three new errors to resolve. I have 5217 errors in the tree–380 possible duplicates, 4237 with no documents, 600 other errors.
- The first error is a doozy. There is a child assigned to this individual who was born well after his death. After reviewing a few hints, it was determined that the errant child belonged to the wife’s second husband. The family was built out a bit and the error was corrected.
- The second error presented is for the granddaughter of one of my cousins. The little girl is five. I don’t have any sources for her. The most obvious citation would be a newspaper announcement, however, the newspapers where they live are not available on Newspapers.com. This one will need to sit until she gets older.
- The last error for this week is no records on the wife of a 6th cousin. Although not part of the error, I’d also like to find her maiden name. I have way too many women in my database with the last name “?”. Found several facts with documents to clear the error and update her last name.
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.
236 years ago – death of Nicolas Joseph Cardinal (6th ggf)
202 years ago – death of Jacob Richardson Jr (6th ggf)
200 years ago – marriage of John Cawood (4th ggf) and his 2nd wife Rachel English
169 years ago – marriage of Sarah Lewis (3rd ggm) and John W Fielden (3rd ggf)
132 years ago – birth of August Cardinal (ggf)
Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 27,642 people
End of Week: 27,557 people
Change = -85 persons
Tasks for coming week:
- Continue focus on Jonathan P. Cox and family – Benjamin Cox
- 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
Digging Up My Roots 