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2025 Week 51

21 Sunday Dec 2025

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As I continue writing the short biographies for my 5th great grandfather’s children, it has occurred to me, more than once, that my families recycle names…a lot. It makes it difficult at times to sort out which documents belong to which person. Not only that, but as I index my manuscript, I may end up with a single name indexing multiple persons. So, what are my options to separate out these many individuals with the same monikers?

Middle names help, if they exist. However, not everyone had a middle name or if they had an initial, it isn’t always known what that initial represents. For example, my dad’s name was Samuel Thomas DeMoss, as was his father. My 2nd great grandfather has only ever been documented as Samuel T. DeMoss. I can distinguish these three as Jr., Sr, and Samuel T.

In some instances, though, middle names aren’t that helpful because both individuals have the same middle name as well. I have two Sarah Piety Coxes in my tree, so far. One was the daughter of Ben and Sarah Cox and lived from 1785 to 1860. The other was a granddaughter of the couple and lived from 1826 to 1888. I could just number them in the text–Sarah Piety (1) and Sarah Piety (2), however, that doesn’t help much when referencing the book index. I have opted in the index to list them as Sarah Piety (1785-1860) and Sarah Piety (1826-1888). This will actually allow the end user to find the individual they are looking for much more quickly.

I didn’t get as much done this week as I had hoped. A lot of holiday festivities required my attention, however, I am hopeful with a couple days off this coming week, AND two scheduled shifts at the genealogical library, will help me get back on track just before the year ends. I was able to write the bio for Austin Piety Cox and his wife Rebecca Phillips. I still need to do the indexing, but that should not take very long to update.

Error resolution. The last available update: I have 4918 errors in the tree–374 possible duplicates, 4088 with no documents, 456 other errors.

  • Distant cousin needs a source. He was named in his grandmother’s obituary, but little can be found. His parents are likely still alive so there really isn’t much to go on.
  • Another distant cousin needing a source. Again, not a lot of information out there except obituaries of the parents.
  • The last error to be resolved was the second husband of a distant cousin. I was able to add a name for him as well.

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.
269 years ago – birth of Catherine Bowen (6th ggm)
225 years ago – birth of Ellinor Johnson (4th ggm)
199 years ago – death of James Butler (6th ggf)
125 years ago – death of Calvin Mattox (2nd ggf)
114 years ago – marriage of Blanche Cox DeMoss (ggm) and her 2nd husband Coen Robertson
107 years ago – birth of Francis Keller Sr (gf)

Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 27,006 people
End of Week: 27,011 people
Change = +5 persons
Tasks for coming week:

  • Finish writing 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

2025 Week 50

14 Sunday Dec 2025

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Last weekend was a travel weekend which didn’t leave much time for genealogy. Of course, a whirlwind trip cross-country to spend less than 48 hours with my sisters during cold and flu season can take a toll and I ended up with a massive head cold as a result. I’m on the mend and ready to finish up Ben and Sarah’s family narrative.

But first, Ancestry has compiled a few year-end statistics for me.

  • Apparently 131,000 new hints were added to my tree
  • 26,850 of those hints came from new collections that were added to the site this year
  • I viewed 8703 records
  • I added 2138 people to my tree
  • My tree helped 1661 other researchers
  • My DNA matches increased by 2510 people

I did accomplish a bit of writing this weekend. I sorted out Joseph Cox who was the focus back in Week 32. He was the one who had previously been identified as a bachelor at the time of his death, but appears to have actually had six children! I also merged duplicate files for him on FamilySearch.

I should be able to finish up Jonathan Piety Cox’s bio before the day is over. He was my focus during Week 33. Since he had not yet reached his majority when he married in 1817, he needed his father’s permission to obtain the marriage license. I think it is so cool that an image of the permission note is available and carries the handwriting and signature of my 5th great-grandfather.

Permission for Jonathan Piety Cox to obtain a marriage license signed by his father Benjamin Cox.

I’ve been playing around with Google’s NotebookLM. I really like the concept of the Infographic. Too bad the free version only gives you three per day. Need to be selective in what you create! I have noticed that when I do a document dump, it tends to make up names and dates, making the graphic worthless. I decided to upload the narrative I wrote for a single family unit–in this case, Gabriel and Nancy (Squires) Cox–to see what it might do. So. Much. Better! It didn’t mention John S Cox having served and died in the Civil War, but that was because his story was told in a previous chapter, focusing on him. I’ll have to decide what to include about the linking child on future runs. At any rate, I thought I’d share the output of my experiment on Gabriel and Nancy. Once I get the process perfected, I think including these in my manuscript will break up the monotony of lots of text.

Since I missed a week, I have 6 error hints to resolve. The last available update: I have 4926 errors in the tree–376 possible duplicates, 4094 with no documents, 456 other errors.

  • Distant cousin needed a source.
  • Husband of a distant cousin needed a first name and a source. I have not been able to identify this individual.
  • Husband of a distant cousin. I used a marriage announcement for the cousin’s brother (also a cousin), to ballpark marriage dates for the siblings and their spouses.
  • Father-in-law for a distant great-granduncle has no sources attached. Since I am pruning extended family from the tree, I deleted him and his wife.
  • Father-in-law for a distant cousin has no sources attached. Again, since I am pruning the tree, he and his wife were also deleted.
  • Distant cousin has no sources attached. I found a few sources for him and cleaned up his family while I was at it.

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 last week and the week ahead.
325 years ago – birth of Anna Schmidt (7th ggm)
304 years ago – birth of Elizabeth Quincy (7th ggm)
298 years ago – birth of Rachel Van Winkle (7th ggm)
264 years ago – marriage of Rachel Maquinet (6th ggm) and John J Pea (6th ggf)
243 years ago – birth of Joseph Cardinal (5th ggf)
235 years ago – birth of Jonathan McCullough (4th ggf)
227 years ago – marriage of Barbara Mattox (5th ggm) and Samuel Wilks (5th ggf)
213 years ago – death of Rachel Van Winkle (7th ggm)
193 years ago – birth of Eli T Butler (3rd ggf)
190 years ago – death of Rebecca Jones (5th ggm)
187 years ago – birth of Joseph Ellis Cardinal (3rd ggf)
170 years ago – marriage of Louisa Reeve (3rd ggm) and Isaac DeMoss (3rd ggf)
165 years ago – death of Margaret Gray (5th ggm)
164 years ago – marriage of George Winkler (3rd ggf) and his second wife Katie Bean
162 years ago – death of Nancy Squires Cox (3rd ggm)
140 years ago – death of Letitia Casey (4th ggm)

Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 27,008 people
End of Week: 27,006 people
Change = -2 persons
Tasks for coming week:

  • Finish writing 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

2025 Week 48

30 Sunday Nov 2025

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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

2025 Week 47

23 Sunday Nov 2025

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Getting started on the writing phase always is a struggle for me. Ideally I should get all these details down as I find them, then do edits when I finish a family. Maybe I’ll take that approach when I work on the family of Isaac Cox and Susannah Tomlinson, Benjamin’s parents.

I like to include a transcription of a document or two with each family if I find one I think is interesting or contains a lot of information that is relevant to the family. I added Benjamin’s Last Will and Testament this week. I may also add Sarah’s to illustrate that sometimes the widows have these documents too.

My focus right now is putting together the migratory details of Benjamin as a very young man. This information will also be useful in trying to determine the timeline for vital statistics for both Benjamin and Sarah, as actual documentation recording their births and their marriage have been elusive to date.

Polk Family and Kinsmen written by WH Polk in 1912 states Benjamin and Sarah were married ca. 1783. This data point appears to be based on their eldest child’s date of birth. The family genealogy also states that Ben was sixteen and Sarah fourteen when this event occurred.1 That would mean he was born ca. 1767 and she ca. 1769. There are concerns with these estimated dates as I mentioned back in Week 21 of this year.

One thing that was evident from the research is that the Cox family was rather prosperous and held a substantial amount of land. This includes Benjamin. According to the Certificate Book of the Virginia Land Commission, which was transcribed in the Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society in 1923, Isaac paid the state rate for 1000 acres of land in Kentucky on Benjamin’s behalf in 1779.2 Under the laws of Virginia at the time, an individual must be of the legal age of twenty-one to purchase land. It’s not clear if someone could purchase land on behalf of a minor and then relinquish it when the child reached their majority. I would think that was not allowed, but I do not positively know. Assuming the law was in play, then Benjamin would have had to be at least twenty one in 1779, making his year of birth no later than 1758.

The 1810 and 1820 US Census was not much help in pinpointing the dates of birth for Benjamin and Sarah. The oldest category for men and women was “over 45”. At a minimum, both of them would have been born prior to 1765 using this information. Sarah, having outlived her husband, was head of household in 1830 and she was listed as between 60 and 69. That would give her a birth year between 1761 and 1770. Since her parents were not married until 1763, a safe bet for her date of birth would be between 1765 and 1768.

All of this circumstantial evidence pretty much debunks the statement of lore that Benjamin was sixteen at his time of marriage. Sarah could have been fourteen, but maybe she was a year or two older than that. We will likely never know for certain.

Tree Ratings are back! I have 3 errors from this week to resolve. I have 4928 errors in the tree–366 possible duplicates, 4106 with no documents, 456 other errors.

  • The first is a mother in law of a distant cousin. Since I am pruning my tree a bit and not including the inlaws, she will be deleted.
  • Number two is a spouse of a distant cousin without documentation. Took a little digging to find something, but Arkansas Voter Registration records came through.
  • Lastly, a distant cousin needs some documentation. Unfortunately, it would seem that he is a tween since his parents were married in 2012. He was named in his grandmother’s obituary which was published online. Ancestry will not recognize a web link as a “record”.

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.
371 years ago – birth of Jacques Cardinal (8th ggf)
347 years ago – marriage of Mary Mason (9th ggm) and John Norton (9th ggf)
343 years ago – marriage of Louise Arrivee (8th ggm) and Jacques Cardinal (8th ggf)
302 years ago – birth of Benjamin Bonnell (7th ggf)
219 years ago – marriage of Francoise Crely (5th ggm) and Joseph Cardinal (5th ggf)
165 years ago – marriage of Sarah Catt (3rd ggm) and Joseph E. Cardinal (3rd ggf)
136 years ago – marriage of Anna Gravel ( 2nd ggm) and James S. Cardinal (2nd ggf)
107 years ago – birth of Lillian E. Fielden (gm)
72 years ago – death of Mathias Keller (2nd ggf)

Goals and progress…
Beginning of Week: 27,009 people
End of Week: 27,007 people
Change = -2 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

  1. Polk, WH, Polk Family and Kinsmen, The Bradley and Gilbert Co, Louisville, KY, 1912, page 366, Ancestry.com. ↩︎
  2. Certificate Book of the Virginia Land Commission 1779-80, Register, Kentucky State Historical Society, volume 21, number 63, pages 302-303, http://www.jstor.org. ↩︎