RLP 272: Proving an Ancestor with DNA: Benjamin Cox

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 272 Proving an Ancestor with DNA, Benjamin Cox Welcome to research Like a Pro a Genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited Genealogist professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at family Locket dot com and the authors of Research Like, a pro A Genealogist guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion Volume Research Like a Pro with DNA. join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research, and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (43s):
Today’s episode is brought to you by find agra.com. The best place to search online for burial information for your family, friends and famous people. Hi, everybody Welcome to research. Like a Pro today. How, are you Diana?

Diana (58s):
I am doing well. How are you Nicole?

Nicole (60s):
Fantastic. What have you been working on or reading?

Diana (1m 4s):
Well, our study group is in full swing and I’m working on the timeline for Clumsy Klein. I did a project on her a year ago and then I did a little mini follow-up project for our 14 day challenge in January of this year and ordered some land patent applications from the National Archives in Washington DC but I didn’t have the time to fully go through those, make the citations, put them into my timeline. So I am revisiting that, working on getting those I’ll put into my timeline for the three individuals that I think are her family members. Not sure yet. This is such a severely burned county.

Diana (1m 44s):
They’re in Isard County and all the counties around Isard. So it’s really tricky finding records and making connections, which is why I’m doing this project. So it’s been fun revisiting this research and actually getting those land patents into my timeline.

Nicole (2m 1s):
Cool. Yeah, land patents are a fun source,

Diana (2m 4s):
You know, you’re always hoping that you’re going to get in the application some little clue and so far they look like they’re just pretty straightforward. You know, John Cline applied for the land on this day, he paid this much money and here’s the certificate, but that’s okay. You know, it’s one of those avenues you just continue following up on and they actually have track book entries so you know, on the track books that they create and my next step will probably be to go look those up and see if there are any other clues there. So one thing leads to another,

Nicole (2m 37s):
Right? Yeah, we always hope there’ll be some great clue, but it’s just part of reasonably exhaustive research to chase down all these leads and then you know, if there’s nothing there, at least be checked.

Diana (2m 47s):
Exactly. And you just move on. Well let’s do some announcements. We have our Airtable quick reference guide available on the website for A P D F download and we have our Research Like, a Pro Webinar series for 2023 going and this has been so fun. We have enjoyed these. All the recordings are there. If you’re interested in joining up and just watching all the past case studies really showing how people use the Research Like a Pro and Research Like, a pro d n A process to make progress on their projects. Our next study group will be in the spring and this will be a D N A study group.

Diana (3m 28s):
So if you’re interested, you can take a look at our website and if you’re interested in being a peer group leader, the application is on our website and that’s a really great opportunity to be able to meet with a small group weekly and really dig into your projects together. And as always, join our newsletter or any coupons for sales as they come up

Nicole (3m 51s):
Today. We get to talk about Proving an Ancestor with d n a. And I know this is a topic a lot of you’ll be very interested in. We’ll use as an example, the case study of Benjamin Cox who’s one of our Ancestors that my mom Diana has researched a lot. So do you also have an individual that you have researched a lot of times and maybe you found a lot of indirect evidence pointing to him or her as your Ancestor, but maybe you’re still unsure and you’re not quite certain of the next steps to really prove that connection? Well, D n A evidence is a fantastic tool to help you prove those biological relationships that you have inferred you’ve suspected but you haven’t really feel or final final.

Nicole (4m 33s):
And so we can use this tool to help give weight and evidence to our conclusions a lot of the time. The d n a evidence will support our conclusion and that can really help us feel more confident with it. So a while ago, Diana hypothesized Benjamin Cox as the father of her third great-grandmother, Rachel Cox. That would be my fourth great-grandmother. And records in Texas in 1850 are not very plentiful and although the Migration pattern seemed correct leading to Texas and kinda matching up with the, the relatives in the fan club, it just wasn’t certain. And some of the other Cox researchers did not have Rachel as a daughter of Benjamin Cox in their family trees and they didn’t believe she was Benjamin’s daughter.

Nicole (5m 21s):
So there was doubt cast onto this hypothesis,

Diana (5m 24s):
Right? You know, it’s always kind of disappointing when you email someone, you say, Hey, I think my person is in the family, and they email back and say, no, she’s not in our family tree. She was probably just a niece. They would just travel all over the place. And I thought, that doesn’t make sense to me. It everything seems like she should be in the family. So we had done D n A and had seen that we actually matched up on a little segment, but this was many, many years ago and there just was not a big enough database on ancestry d n A to really work with the D N A. So when I returned to this in 2019, there was much more evidence to use for D N A with a lot more people having tested and a lot more people in the database.

Diana (6m 10s):
So when I started using the Research Like a Pro with d n a process to work on this case, I ended up doing two projects on Benjamin and Rachel Cox hoping either to disprove or to prove the relationship. And you know, sometimes we don’t want to think about disproving, but that can be just as helpful because then you, you move on. So I did complete projects with the study group and ended up with two complete reports and it was Really good for me to do a complete project because it made me go back to the records and write up my conclusions so I could see clearly what was I thinking, why did I have this little thought that Rachel should be in this family?

Diana (6m 58s):
So I, I went ahead and attached Benjamin Cox as her father in my ancestry tree so that I would get through lines and then I started messaging those and I immediately got a response. It, it’s always so exciting when you find someone else who was into D N A and Genealogy and I got a response from this woman and she turned out to be a descendant of Benjamin’s only son and she had a similar case where this son was not mentioned in the records and she just felt like he had to be Benjamin Cox’s son. And so we shared D N A information and it looked like this was really plausible that her Ancestor and mine were brother and sister and both came from Benjamin.

Diana (7m 46s):
But then I decided I needed to have more evidence and I needed to do more documentary research for Benjamin in his prett Texas years. I had traced him pretty well in Texas and even a bit in Arkansas, but then he had this Migration path from Ohio and Indiana that I really knew nothing about. A few people online had some trees with some records, but I hadn’t personally really tracked that. And so I decided that needed to be a project and I also needed more d n a evidence. So I recruited four additional test takers who were all either descendants of Rachel Cox or one of them was a descendant of one of the pretty much known children of Benjamin.

Diana (8m 31s):
And they let me use their d n a, they just shared their results with me at Ancestry and then I could see their matches. And the really great thing was that two of them were a generation closer to Benjamin Cox and they had so many more matches and better matches, they shared much more D n A with those matches than I did because I was just sharing small pieces. You know, I was doing like 10 to 15 cent Morgans and they had 30 and 40 so we were getting much better d n a evidence from them.

Nicole (9m 0s):
That’s always so exciting when you can see your evidence piling up when you, especially when you get those test acres who are closer and generationally.

Diana (9m 9s):
Yes.

Nicole (9m 10s):
Okay, well next I’m going to read the conclusion of the second report that Diana wrote and this will be helpful to kind of see what she learned and also it can give you an example of of how a conclusion might sound of a research report. If you haven’t never written one before and one of the important parts of writing a conclusion of a research report is to kind of reiterate the main conclusions, the things that you found and then whether or not you felt you met the research objective and If you didn’t meet the research objective. The next section will say the research that you need to continue doing. Okay, let’s read this. This research project was very successful in identifying more information about Benjamin Cox in early Indiana.

Nicole (9m 54s):
Records records for each of his proposed children pointed to a birth of between 1813 and 1829 in Ohio or Indiana tracing Ohio tax and marriage records. Then Indiana census and land records, a likely candidate for the Benjamin Cox of this record was identified. Benjamin first appeared in Ross County Ohio tax records of 1810. He married Kasiah Barbie in 1813 in Ross County and continued to be listed in the tax records there until 1819. By 1820 he had moved his household west to the Flat Rock Township in the Delaware, Indiana session. Flat Rock became part of Bartholomew County in 1821 and Benjamin probably received a land patent for neighboring Jackson County in 1827.

Nicole (10m 39s):
By 1830 he was residing in Monroe County, Indiana Benjamin’s oldest daughter’s, Amy and Levia married in 1834 in Bartholomew County, Indiana. Amy never left Indiana but the remainder of Benjamin’s proposed children migrated to Arkansas then to Texas. The pre 1850 census records for the household of Benjamin Cox have appropriate places for the proposed children and by 1860, nearly all the married couples are residing in Bell County, Texas. The exceptions are Amy who remained in Indiana and Rachel whose location in 1860 is unknown. The D N a evidence showed multiple shared matches between Benjamin, Cox, descendants, Diana Elder, Lucrecia, Becker Neal, Patricia Hoskins, and Darryl Stevens.

Nicole (11m 24s):
Between the four descendants matches were shown to other Cox descendants through all of the proposed Cox children combined with traditional research which shows a similar Migration from Indiana, Arkansas to Texas. The d n a evidence proves conclusively that Benjamin Cox was the father of Rachel Cox.

Diana (11m 41s):
It’s fun to read through that conclusion again and remember all the research that led to that and you know as you listen to that, so If, you heard listening probably realize, realized that I had to do a lot of research, I had to go through each of those children and of course he had a lot of children we’re not just talking two or three, I think he ended up with eight or nine and tracing all of them, which was fun. It was great to, to see that evidence adding up. Well I needed to have a method to track that d n a that was shared between each of those test takers. So I had to look at at my D n A and and find all of my matches and then I had to look at creation, find all of her matches.

Diana (12m 24s):
And so I tried my hand at creating a McGuire chart and this is just a chart that shows the genetic network between multiple descendants of Benjamin Cox. So I listed my five test takers whose D N A I had access to on the far left of the chart you can picture, you know, a lucid chart diagram and I gave each person a different color and then I put the D N A matches coming straight down from the child that they descended from. And then I did a little circle under each of the descendants that we matched and put how much each person shared.

Diana (13m 5s):
And so you know, it was kind of a labor intensive project. Would I do it again like that? I don’t know, maybe it was fun to do the chart and I really did see that the evidence just added up. So oh there are six known children. So the six known children of Benjamin Cox I put across the top and I did them in chronological order by birth and then I have all of their descendancy coming down and some of them had more D n A matches than others just because perhaps they had more children or more people in that family had taken a D N A test. But of my five test takers, there was not one D n a match that everybody matched.

Diana (13m 51s):
There was not one descendant that all five of us matched. There would, there was a descendant that four of us matched or that two of us matched or that just one of us matched So. it was really interesting to see this randomness of D N A inheritance coming down and seeing how each of us that I had access to D N A results for matched a little differently with all these different descendants.

Nicole (14m 16s):
And that’s why it’s so important to have multiple test takers whose results you can analyze because then you can find more evidence instead of kind of that body evidence where you were just looking at your own test, you only matched a few of the descendants of Benjamin and it was small amounts but then you know at the body of evidence when you had three or four test takers to compare so many more matches, it just really helps you build up a case.

Diana (14m 43s):
Absolutely And it was really great to confirm what my hypothesis was through the D N A.

Nicole (14m 51s):
Yeah it really helps you feel like I did a good job with my documentary research.

Diana (14m 56s):
I drew the right conclusions all the way along there.

Nicole (14m 59s):
That’s great. Well let’s talk more about who was Benjamin Cox? Well he was likely born in Ohio about 1791 perhaps in Ross County since he first appeared in the tax records there in 1810. He was at that time residing in Jefferson Township and he had purchased land from John Groves and his land was not on a watercourse but he was near a tributary of the Scioto River. And on the map you can see this map If, you go to the corresponding blog post and there’s a blue pin on the map that shows the land for the description of Range 20 township eight, section 35 Southwest in Ross County.

Nicole (15m 45s):
And Benjamin married Kasiah Barbie on May 7th, 1813, almost one year after his probable sister Rachel Cox married Harley Barbie on four June, 1812. This is interesting because it looks kind of like the case of siblings marrying siblings, right? And so this is very likely but it needs a little more research to verify. But the name Rachel caught Diana’s attention because our Ancestor is also named Rachel So. it seems possible that Benjamin could have named his daughter after this probable sister, which is a great clue for naming patterns and it, it really adds to your body of evidence when you can see that well Benjamin and Kaza had a large family, almost entirely of daughters connecting Rachel to Benjamin involved tracing each of these siblings and noting their similar migrations from Ohio or Indiana to Texas.

Nicole (16m 47s):
And it’s just interesting that all of these proposed children to Benjamin except for Amy the first they all moved south to Arkansas and then continued moving on to Texas.

Diana (16m 57s):
Yeah, I thought that was interesting too, just that lure of land perhaps in Texas always the land. Well let’s just look briefly at each of those children. So there was Amy and she’s the one that stays in Indiana. She was born about 1814 in Ross County and died in 1907 in Jackson County, Indiana. She just stayed put and she had married in Baral Mu County Indiana in 1834. And it was really great because there was actually a marriage record for Amy. And so you know, sometimes when we have a lot of record loss it’s nice to get those specific records that put people in that place. Well the next sister was Lana Cox and she was born about 1814, so they’re both born about 1814, you know was one of those cases we don’t know specifically, but they were pretty close in age and she died after her 1860 census enumeration in Bell County, Texas.

Diana (17m 54s):
So we don’t have specific information about her, she just shows up on the 1860 census in Texas and then she’s gone. But we do have her marriage record there in Bartholomew County again. And she married the same year as her sister, 1834, just six weeks after her sister and she married first a crouch, John Crouch and then she secondly married Lawson Smith. Well next we have Sarah Cox who married a Stevens and she was born a little bit later between 1860 and 1820 in either Ohio or Indiana, depending on which census you’re looking at. So you can see that they knew there was some Ohio background but then also some Indiana they, whoever was, was the informant knew of that Migration and she again died after her 1880 enumeration and we don’t have a specific death for her and she, she died actually in Arkansas so she didn’t quite make it over to Texas.

Diana (18m 51s):
And then we have Minerva who was born on April 11th, 1821 in Indiana and died on 11 September, 1902 in Falls County, Texas. So we have death information and birth information for her from the records that were created at her death. And then we have the only boy William Thomas Cox and he was born in 1827 in Indiana and died in 1912 in Limestone County, Texas. Married Elizabeth in 1848 and Sarah in 1865. And then we have Rachel, our Ancestor and she looks to be the baby of the family born in 1829 in Indiana and died between 1870 and 1880 in Falls County.

Diana (19m 35s):
So again, don’t have a death date for her. So many of these people just died in Texas and we haven’t found headstones or they didn’t last if they did erect a headstone and it was too early for death certificates and they didn’t record them in the counties so we don’t really know. But she had Mary Taman Monroe Schultz in 1850 on July 4th in Navarro County, Texas. So that’s really how I knew her maiden name was Cox because I have a marriage record that says Rachel Cox. So you know there’s a rundown of the family and you can see why when I kept seeing she was born 1829 in Indiana, I thought, well she fits into this family that has Indiana Roots and the dates really seem to match up.

Diana (20m 20s):
All right, well let’s take a minute and hear a word from our sponsor. Find a grave. Find a grave is the ultimate online destination to Discover burial information and cemetery details for family, friends and famous people. Finding the graves of your Ancestors has never been easier. You can create virtual memorials, add photos of headstones and honor your loved ones with virtual flowers. Find a Graves user-friendly search features allow you to explore by name, location, cemetery, date, and more. Their dedicated community of members continually adds new information so it’s worth searching again. If, you haven’t found what you were looking for. Want to be part of the find a grave community, download the free app, visit your local cemetery and contribute missing grave information.

Diana (21m 7s):
It’s a a rewarding way to spend time outdoors while helping others find the burial locations of their loved ones.

Nicole (21m 15s):
Well let’s talk a little bit about Benjamin Cox’s Migration. We’ve alluded to the fact that he migrated all over the place and that makes it pretty tricky, especially when there’s a common name like Benjamin Cox. His presence in Ohio seemed fairly certain because of the tax and the marriage records, but what about his move to Indiana that was important to the hypothesis since Rachel Cox was born about 1829 in Indiana. So we needed to be able to place Benjamin there in 1829 with historical records. So the 1820 census listed 10 men named Benjamin Cox who resided in either Ohio or Indiana.

Nicole (21m 56s):
Can you believe that 10 men studying the tax records of Ross County Ohio found that Benjamin consistently paid taxes for the Jefferson Township land until 1819, which is the last time he’s listed there. So we reasoned that Benjamin moved to Indiana by 1820 and then researched each of the 1820 listings to prove or disprove them. The best case for our Benjamin Cox was the 1820 enumeration of Flat Rock Township in the newly formed Delaware County Indiana. Adding to evidence that this was the correct Benjamin was the presence of Daniel and Olaf Barbie, likely family members of Benjamin’s wife Kaza Barbie.

Nicole (22m 42s):
And I love that because it just shows how important and helpful the fan club can be when you have men of the same name and with a surname like Barbie, B A R B E E, that’s relatively uncommon compared to Cox that can really help you figure out which is your right person. A land patent in Jackson County. And then marriage records for Benjamin’s, two oldest daughters in Bartholomew County and then the 1830 census of Monroe County, Indiana all showed Benjamin and his family reciting in the same general vicinity and in the blog post you can look at the map and see stars on these three locations in Indiana.

Nicole (23m 23s):
So this was helpful because it helped us confirm that Rachel Cox, who was born in 1829 in Indiana could fit into the family and that Benjamin lived there indi in Indiana. And so the makeup of the 1830 census does show a female under five and that could have been Rachel sometime after Rachel’s birth, her mother Kasiah died and Benjamin moved the family south to Arkansas where he married again to the widow Elizabeth Donahoe Sutton. That blended family resulted in a large household of 18 individuals ranging from young children to a male between 70 to 79, possibly a father of either Benjamin or Elizabeth.

Nicole (24m 5s):
And this was the household in 1840 I believe. Again, Rachel fit into this family as one of the three females ages 10 to 14. But I’m imagining that having this huge blended family made it a little bit trickier to sort out everyone was in that enumeration.

Diana (24m 23s):
Yeah, it did. And it turned out that that was what was causing some of the trouble with the other researcher because of that census and attributing the wrong people as children of Benjamin Cox. So let’s talk about Texas. Benjamin moved his household yet again this time to Navarro County, Texas between 1843 when he was last taxed in Izard County and 1848 when he shows up as a road commissioner in Navarro County, Texas. So that was a key record in connecting them because Rachel had married Hickman Monroe Schultz on July 4th, 1848 in Navarro County.

Diana (25m 5s):
And guess what? Monroe Schultz and Benjamin Cox were road commissioners in the same road. And so I knew that they were there in the same area in Texas, which is why I had really pinpointed him as as a connection. Now by the 1850 census enumeration Benjamin had actually moved from Navarro County, so he distanced, they put over to Travis County and that was the first census to name all the household members. And that does show the blended Cox Sutton household as well as two daughters of Benjamin and Elizabeth his second wife, so one of the Cox females, she was named Hannah Cox and she was age 19 and she was the daughter that other researchers had in place of Rachel in the family trees.

Diana (25m 52s):
Rachel was 20 at the time, but d n a analysis proved that wrong. Hannah was a Sutton and a daughter of Elizabeth but not Benjamin. And so she had just been named a Cox which threw everyone off and and we see that all the time in the 1850 census. We’ve had other Ancestors where they just list all the children by the second husband’s name even though he’s not a biological father. Benjamin moved again to Bell County, Texas and that’s where he lived out his life. He even served as a Texas ranger in his sixties and a history of Bell County talks about Lieutenant Benjamin Cox as part of the independent blues organized to pursue Indians who made a raid down Nolan Creek and stole many horses from the Coxes and Suttons the heaviest losers.

Diana (26m 39s):
So like so many of these early Texans, no evidence has come to light with a specific date for him. And the last residence we have was 1870. He was still living with Elizabeth and he was noted as a wood workman for his occupation and at age 79 for that census, he probably died soon after as the 1880 census does not show him at all. So tracing his life just provided such a great timeline of his Migration and a place for Rachel in the family and then D n A provided the needed proof of where she fit in.

Nicole (27m 17s):
Wow, that’s just wonderful to be able to come to that conclusion. And the part about Hannah was so interesting, the fact that Hannah was listed as a Cox with her stepfather’s surname in 1850 had thrown researchers for a loop and it just really points to the importance of reasonably exhaustive research and not just for your person but for everyone in their family. And If you don’t do that. You risk coming to incorrect conclusions like putting Hannah Cox as one of Benjamin’s daughters.

Diana (27m 45s):
Right. And the d n a evidence showed that none of my test takers had any type of connection to Hannah Cox whatsoever. So, it was, it was obvious that she was not biologically a Cox.

Nicole (27m 57s):
Right. Did you do additional documentary research on her to trace her forward or backward?

Diana (28m 2s):
I had already done some research on her and I saw that she actually ends up moving near Rachel Cox. She married a wood, was the surname of the individual. And I think that even though they would’ve been stepsisters because they were similar in age, I think that they kept more together than maybe some of the other siblings. So that was kind of fun and I haven’t traced her much more than that, but I did, you know, do the, did the basic tracing to see where she went and, and what happened to her.

Nicole (28m 37s):
What an interesting instance of using negative D n a evidence. You know, If, you didn’t have matches to descendants of Hannah just by yourself. That wouldn’t be very strong. But when you have four descendants of Benjamin Cox and none of them are matching any descendants of Hannah Cox is a bit stronger. You know, of course there’s always a chance that she didn’t have any descendants who’ve D n A tested. So, you know, it’s possible they’re just not showing up. But I like this negative evidence that you have so far. It’s great.

Diana (29m 11s):
Yeah, it’s fun. This was a fun project, one of my favorites because I actually was able to come to a good conclusion.

Nicole (29m 17s):
Yeah. And I love the idea that they were the same age Hannah and Rachel and that they were friends and that, you know, they continued to stay in touch and we’re neighbors. So it’s kind of fun to think about that.

Diana (29m 28s):
It is and especially in a really large family like this. Going back to that timeline of the children, Rachel was quite a bit younger than her other siblings. The oldest one, Amy was born about 1814 and Rachel wasn’t born until 1829. So a a 15 year span thereabout. So she would’ve probably connected much more with Hannah.

Nicole (29m 52s):
Well Thank you for sharing that and it’s so fun to talk about one of our Ancestors that we’ve been able to find a lot of d n a evidence that confirms the hypothesis. So it’s fun to have been able to add Benjamin Cox to her family tree.

Diana (30m 6s):
Well great.

Nicole (30m 7s):
Alright, well if you’re interested in learning more about the process Diana used in doing this research, check out her Webinar on this case study and our Research Like, a Pro Webinar 2023 series in January. She talked about this case study and you can also read the two reports that she wrote about Benjamin Cox and those are posted in the show notes for this episode and the blog post that goes along with it. Alright, thanks for listening everybody. Have a great week Hi

Diana (30m 33s):
Everyone.

Nicole (30m 34s):
Hi Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like, a Pro and Research Like a Pro with d a on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family Locket dot com slash services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.