RLP 355: Anna Nash and the Cowderys: Uncovering Family Connections

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 355, Anna Nash and the Cowderys: Uncovering Family Connections. 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 genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.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 (41s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro. And Hi Mom.

Diana (48s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (51s):
I’m great. I’ve been enjoying reading this new article in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly journal by Darcie Hind Posz called New Jersey Pickles and a North Carolina Buckle, A DNA Cluster Links to Distant Lines of Descent.

Diana (1m 9s):
I’m reading the same one. It’s really fascinating, isn’t it? I love seeing how other people use DNA and this one is neat because she is using it to go far back to like the ninth generation, which is pushing the edge.

Nicole (1m 22s):
Yeah, it’s interesting the more we learn about autosomal DNA, we see that sometimes these segments from ancestors far back like 10 to 20 generations back, they don’t get smaller and smaller. Sometimes they just get passed down intact, you know, 15 to 30 centiMorgans in size and so you can, you can use them if you inherited one of those segments and you can trace the lines back further, then you can figure it out. But it’s interesting because Darcie is doing research for someone else, for Jan Alpert, and she is sharing how Alpert had this Kuntz cluster and they were trying to figure out who the common ancestor of that cluster was.

Nicole (2m 6s):
And it was neat to see some different tools and different methods discussed in this article that haven’t been in other ones like using cluster analysis from DNA GEDCom and walking the cluster back. So it’s neat to see those different methodologies and then ultimately using many different ways of showing the evidence. The DNA evidence, there are a lot of descendancy diagrams and then there’s DNA segments on chromosome one shared by various descendants in the article and a lot of documentary research as you might imagine. So it’s interesting to see those two names that are a little different, Pickle and Buckle, going back to the same common ancestor,

Diana (2m 52s):
Right? And this is German Palatines coming over early, I believe 1719, so a little bit earlier than our Germans that were more 1740ish. And I am just fascinated by this and looking at my pedigree chart, which has so many holes out at not even that level and thinking, oh my goodness, as we learn more and more about DNA and as we are starting to really understand the different clusters in our DNA and assigning those to ancestors and then seeing what’s left over and figuring out who those belong to, I’m hoping that someday we can fill out all these holes, you know, wouldn’t that be great?

Nicole (3m 33s):
Right. Yeah. And we have been really working on getting a lot of cousins to test and with the Ancestry Pro Tools, we can see a lot about how people share and getting them to share their full results with us. ’cause it’s a lot more matches to work with that maybe, you know, they inherited DNA from those more distant Ancestors that maybe we didn’t. So it’s just really neat to see the possibilities

Diana (3m 56s):
It is. And I appreciate people like Darcie who put their research out there and really show us how they are doing it, how they’re working with it, because we might kind of have tunnel vision. This is the way, way we’ve always worked with our DNA and it’s always good to see other ways and how other people have solved a problem.

Nicole (4m 17s):
Right? It is. So if anyone else wants to read this, I will just mention that it is in the March, 2025 version of the NGS Quarterly. Alright, well for announcements today, we want to share that our next webinar in the Research Like a Pro Webinar Series, which is a monthly case study series focusing on the Research Like a Pro with DNA process, we have Research Like a Pro AND Research Like a Pro with DNA process, depending on the case. The next one will be on May 17th, and it’s Avoiding Assumptions: Tracing a Family in 19th Century London, presented by Jessica Taylor Morgan, who is an accredited genealogist.

Nicole (4m 58s):
And this case study is focusing on England and some of the challenges of English genealogical research. It’s about George White who was born in 1863 and died in 1928 in London. And the case explores the varying availability of historical records, the diverse occupations typical of the period and the challenges presented by misleading records. So hopefully this will be useful for those of you who are wanting to learn more about researching in England. Also, the next Research Like a Pro study group, will begin this fall, August 27th, 2025, and registration will begin May 21st. So if you’re thinking about joining us, put that date on your calendar to come on and register on May 21st.

Nicole (5m 43s):
And if you’d like to help out as a peer group leader, you can receive free registration for the study group. So email us or use our application form to apply. Then of course we have our newsletter every Monday, so join that to get a weekly email from us with our new content. And we will be attending the National Genealogical Society Family History Conference May 23rd through the 26th in Louisville, Kentucky. And hopefully we will see many of you there. Well, today we get to talk about another one of my husband’s ancestors, Anna Nash. And I recently discovered a cool connection between her and one of the prominent leaders of the LDS Church, Oliver Cowdery.

Nicole (6m 28s):
And I was surprised to find out that my husband’s third cousin, five times removed, married into the Cowdery family. So this is on the line of my husband’s fourth great-grandmother, Anna Nash. And Anna was born in Butternuts, Otsego County, New York, and she was born 16 years before her second cousin, Aaron Nash Jackson, had a son named Daniel Jackson, also born in the same town of Butternuts. And this son Daniel would grow up to marry Phebe Cowdery, who was Oliver Cowdery’s half sister, and they got married in Kirtland, Ohio. So that was kind of a fun connection.

Nicole (7m 8s):
So I decided to dive in and explore that connection to see if there were any kind of familial influences going on there with Anna Nash and her husband perhaps influencing the conversion of Daniel Jackson to be a member of the LDS church at that time, since they were both from the same town of Butternuts. And so I wanted to explore that.

Diana (7m 30s):
All right, well let’s start off and talk a little bit about Oliver Cowdery and who he was. He was a school teacher lodging in the home of Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith. And they told Oliver about Joseph, their son’s, work in translating ancient gold plates and he was interested in learning more. Oliver went to Harmony, Pennsylvania where Joseph and Emma were living and became Joseph’s scribe in this translation effort. And several of the sections of the doctrine and covenants are revelations directed at him, including section six, eight, and nine. And later on in his history, he was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints because he disagreed with church leaders at the time over financial affairs in 1838.

Diana (8m 21s):
But he was readmitted in 1848 at Kanesville, which later became known as Council Bluffs in Pottawatomie County, Iowa. Oliver’s health declined and although he wanted to travel to Utah with the other saints who were making that Western migration, he died in 1850 before he could make it there. He has no living descendants. He married Elizabeth Ann Whitmer and they had six children, but only Maria Louise Cowdery lived past childhood. And Elizabeth and Maria, his wife and daughter who survived, died in 1892 and were buried together.

Nicole (9m 1s):
That was so interesting when I researched Oliver to learn about his life because a lot of these early leaders of our church, they had a lot of descendants, but Oliver doesn’t have any. No living descendants. And it was also interesting to hear about how influential he was at the beginning of the church when he was just as scribe, but then when he disagreed about management of the church financial affairs, he left for a while, but he came back and wanted to be a member again in 1848, so right before he died. And it seems like he never really changed his beliefs, but he just didn’t agree with how the church was being run.

Nicole (9m 42s):
So that was interesting to learn about. Well, I learned about him using the Joseph Smith Papers, which has really good succinct biographies that are so cited of many of these early church leaders as well as the Oliver Cowdery Church history topic on the church’s website, which had a little bit more of an expanded biography about him. So that was helpful. Well, Oliver did have several siblings, so even though he has no surviving descendants today, his siblings do. And so Oliver’s parents were William Cowdery and Rebecca Fuller. And after Rebecca died in 1809, William got married again to Keziah Pierce and they had three more children, including Phebe Lawrence Cowdery, who was born in 1817.

Nicole (10m 30s):
So Oliver’s half sister, Phebe is the one who got married into my husband’s family. So Phebe Cowdery married Daniel Jackson, Daniel Smith Jackson, on December 15th in 1836 in Kirtland, Geuga County, Ohio. So Daniel is, like I said at the beginning, the second cousin once removed of Anna Nash Gifford, who is my husband’s fourth great-grandmother. So interestingly, Kirtland, Ohio, where Phebe Cowdery and Daniel Jackson got married, when they got married there it was part of Geuga County.

Nicole (11m 10s):
Originally Kirtland was part of Trumbull County, but then later in the 1840s it was taken from Geuga County and they created a new county called Lake County. So it went through three different counties at this time. The area was rapidly growing and changing. So it’s one of those examples of a county changing in size basically. And so one town, Kirtland being part of three different counties just in the space of a few years. So I found more out about Phebe Cowdery Jackson in a database at Ancestry called Membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830 to 1848.

Nicole (11m 51s):
And this was really helpful because it combined the names of individual’s parents, so Phebe’s parents along with her birth and death information, and then some of her membership information like when she was baptized and that kind of thing. So that was a really helpful source that I found on Ancestry. And then of course for Phebe’s marriage to Daniel, that was just a, a county marriage record for Geuga County in Ohio.

Diana (12m 21s):
That’s great. You have used so many different sources and I love how you’ve used authored sources things online and as well as digging down and finding the original source like the marriage records. So such a good example of just covering all of your bases. And these histories are amazing that you can find online often. Well, let’s talk about Daniel Smith Jackson. He was born in Butternuts, Otsego, New York [Vermont stated in error] and baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1836. He received a patriarchal blessing there from Joseph Smith, Sr, and we talked about this in a previous episode. So that was right after he was baptized.

Diana (13m 2s):
It sounds like he received his blessing and he was also ordained a Seventy. And this all probably occurred before he married Phebe Cowdery on 15 December, 1836. But more research could reveal that information. There’s always more research once we discover something, and we’re not sure when Phebe joined the church, but probably it was because of her brother Oliver Cowdery’s leadership position in the church. And Oliver probably shared his new beliefs with his family. Now, Daniel Smith Jackson’s conversion to the church in 1836 may have been a result of his second cousin, Anna Nash Gifford and her husband, Alpheus Gifford, was a missionary and may have taught Daniel and other relatives of Anna’s in Butternuts where he and Anna had been married in 1817.

Diana (13m 56s):
Phebe Cowdery Jackson must have respected her brother Oliver Cowdery because she named her first son after him, Oliver Cowdery Jackson. And he was born in January of 1846 and Daniel and Phebe moved with the Saints to Nauvoo where they were sealed in the Nauvoo Temple on February 4th, 1846. But instead of going with the Saints to Utah, they migrated to Sacramento, California. That’s so interesting. Did you find out why they might have gone to California instead?

Nicole (14m 25s):
I didn’t know why. And that’s something I made a list at the end of this article because it actually opened up a lot of questions for future research and that was one of them. And so I just made a list of all the questions, ’cause I didn’t have time when I was writing this blog post to explore that. But I did have that question too.

Diana (14m 45s):
Was it because of the Gold Rush?

Nicole (14m 47s):
It could have been. It was right at that time.

Diana (14m 50s):
That was a big draw for a lot of people. And you know, if they knew anything about the weather, who wouldn’t go to California instead of Utah. But however, Sacramento’s really, really hot in the summer, so that is so interesting. Well now let’s have a word from our sponsor. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Break down genealogy brick walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Did you know Newspapers.com has over 1 billion pages of digitized newspapers dating back to 1690? Their growing collection includes papers from the US, OK, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Discover birth and marriage announcements, obituaries and everyday stories about your Ancestors in seconds. Newspapers.com can help you fill in the gaps between vital records and reveal details about your ancestors’ lives that you can’t find anywhere else.

Diana (15m 42s):
Their easy to use search feature lets you filter your results by date, location, specific paper and more. When you find something interesting, Newspapers.com makes it a snap to share it with family and friends. You can even save it directly to your Ancestry tree. Come explore 1 billion pages and make infinite discoveries today on Newspapers.com. Use promo code FamilyLocket for a 20% discount on your subscription. Well, let’s talk a little bit now about Anna’s background and the common ancestor is between your husband’s line Nicole and Daniel Jackson Smith is Abraham Nash and Rhoda Keeler, and they had a daughter named Rhoda Nash.

Diana (16m 27s):
She married Azor Nash, her first cousin, and they named one of their sons Azor Nash Jr. And he married Lucy Shaw and they were the parents of Anna Nash. She was born February 17th, 1800 in Butternuts, Otsego County, New York and Anna married Alpheus Gifford on April 27th in Butternuts. Alpheus was a Methodist minister who began preaching at age 18, yet in 1831 he heard missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints and was baptized, and Anna was probably also baptized about this time. So it looks like you learned quite a bit about her from Memories on FamilySearch, which is one of my favorite sources to go see what someone has written.

Diana (17m 14s):
And this was written by her great-great-granddaughter. So it’s an authored source, but it gives us some details we wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Nicole (17m 25s):
Right, yes. And I love the Memories section of FamilySearch because this includes a lot of unique stories that we wouldn’t probably have any other way than by being passed down through family memory. One of them is the story of Anna Nash and the Snake, and that’s the story that was recorded by the great-great-granddaughter. And so she was kind of giving some background on the family before she launched into the Snake story, the snake story, which I’ll tell you about in a minute. But I also cited that story to say that Anna Nash was probably baptized about the time that Alpheus was. And I find it interesting that in this blog article I could not find any record of Anna Nash’s baptism or Phebe Cowdery, and I just had to kind of assume that they occurred around the same time as their husbands because it wasn’t recorded in the sources I was looking at.

Nicole (18m 21s):
So that’s something I want to do future research on is to see if I can find those. I would just like to know if it was recorded and it made me wonder if sometimes a wife’s baptism was just kind of lumped in with her husband. But I do know that sometimes a wife and a husband would get baptized at different times just depending on when they were ready. So I don’t know.

Diana (18m 44s):
Hmm. And those baptismal records are usually pretty good and pretty thorough. So I would imagine with some digging you might be able to find both of those.

Nicole (18m 54s):
Yeah, there are some cases where you can’t find anything and the baptism will be cited to like a missionary’s journal where he records that someone was baptized. That’s the case with my husband’s ancestors who were baptized in Georgia, but it wasn’t like recorded anywhere else except for in a missionary journal. And so luckily that missionary journal is now digitized on the church history catalog. So it was available to look at because there were some questions on that profile on FamilySearch for that ancestor about like, oh did, was he baptized or not? Like, ’cause his whole family was, but then he died in Georgia and they came west to Colorado where there was like a settlement of Southern Latter Day Saints who all kinda lived in Colorado together.

Nicole (19m 42s):
But since he didn’t come, there was some confusion about whether or not he was ever a member. But that missionary journal gave us the answer.

Diana (19m 51s):
Yeah. Interesting.

Nicole (19m 52s):
Well, let’s get onto the snake story. Well, when the Latter Day Saints were being driven from county to county, from Missouri to Illinois, by mobs who didn’t like them, they were camped in a place with many snakes. And Anna Nash took her clothes and went to wash them down by the stream and she set down her baby while she washed the clothes. And several snakes came out of their holes at that time and presumably were around the baby, which would be terrifying. And so to save the baby, Anna had to kill these snakes and she got tired of killing all these snakes.

Nicole (20m 32s):
And while she was doing it, she prayed promising never to kill a snake if he would promise the snakes would never harm her family. And so from then on she never killed a snake and her family was not harmed by them. Well, several years later, Anna in Utah, had to remember this promise to not ever kill a snake again because she saw her children sleeping and a huge snake was lying between two of her children. And that would be just awful. I would be so terrified. While she was also terrified, but she remembered her promise and without waking up her children, she shook her finger at the snake and whispered to the snake to go away. And then the snake left the room.

Nicole (21m 14s):
So that is a story that has been passed down through the generations by Anna Nash’s descendants. And it was committed to paper by her great-great granddaughter, Annie Matheson, whose relative uploaded it to FamilySearch memories.

Diana (21m 31s):
Well, I can see why that story got passed down because that’s a pretty intense story. I don’t think anyone really like snakes, actually. Maybe some people do like snakes, but

Nicole (21m 42s):
But not wild ones.

Diana (21m 43s):
I don’t really like snakes

Nicole (21m 45s):
When you know where they are, they’re in between your children. Yes.

Diana (21m 49s):
Oh, I don’t like killing snakes either. I’ve done that a couple times out in my yard, but I hate it. So that’s that’s an awesome story. I love that. And that’s so fun that that got passed down and written up and shared on FamilySearch for everyone to see. Well, what happened to this family? Alpheus died December 25th, 1841, and Anna Nash Gifford decided to go with the Saints to the Salt Lake Valley with her son Samuel Kendall Gifford. And she died on September 5th, 1879 at the age of 79. So wow. She had a long life and saw a lot of things in her life.

Nicole (22m 33s):
Yeah, I thought it was interesting that her, her husband, Alpheus passed away and as was the case with many of these older women, they didn’t wanna go travel across the plains to Utah alone, so they would go with one of their children. So she ended up going with her son Samuel. And so that made sense that she would group in with her kids.

Diana (22m 56s):
Oh, for sure.

Nicole (22m 57s):
Well, several of the research ideas that I had, I listed at the end of this blog post. So some of them were to determine when Anna Nash Gifford was baptized, which I think was probably around 1831 when Alpheus Gifford was baptized. And then learned whether it was possible that Anna Nash knew her second cousin, Daniel Smith Jackson, who ended up marrying Phebe Cowdery while living in Butternuts. And it seems likely that since Anna was born in Butternuts in 1800 and then got married there when she was 17 in 1817, that it seems likely that she knew her cousin Daniel ’cause he was born there in 1816. So maybe she knew him as a baby and it would’ve been her second cousin who had the child.

Nicole (23m 40s):
So I think about myself, I know some of my second cousins, but only a couple because we lived in the same area. So because she lived in the same area with her second cousins, maybe she did know them. And another thing I wanted to learn about was when Phebe Lawrence Cowdery was baptized and she was in Kirtland in 1836, and that’s where she got married to Daniel Jackson, Phebe’s cousin. And so he was baptized in 1836, but I couldn’t find her baptism date. And then I also wanna know the date of Daniel’s baptism. I just have 1836. I don’t have the date. Was it before or after his marriage to Phebe Cowdery? I’d like to know that. And then I wanted to know also about the migration of Phebe and Daniel to Kirtland and then onto Sacramento, California.

Nicole (24m 27s):
I wanted to kind of figure out like how did they go when they migrated west? Did they join a wagon train? There weren’t trains at that time yet, so they would’ve had to go by wagon when they moved to Sacramento and when the Church members were going to Utah, they were in organized into a group of wagon trains and things. So I wondered if maybe they originally started out with a Utah bound wagon train and then maybe continued on to California. I don’t know. So that’s a another idea for future research.

Diana (24m 59s):
Yeah, those are all really good ideas. And that can be kind of tricky finding any kind of a record of the wagon trains that go on to California. You know, we’ve done a little bit of research for clients for something like that, and that’s another one that’s difficult to find. So that’ll be interesting to see if you can figure that out.

Nicole (25m 20s):
Yeah, maybe someday. But with the Journals, the people that kept Journals that remain there, a lot of those are cited in the, the Utah migration database. I can’t remember exactly what it’s called. Overland Travel Database or something like that where you can look up people by which wagon train they were part of which pioneer company. And then it has links to original sources like diaries and newspaper articles that mention that wagon group and like what people were part of it. So it has pretty good records. It’s pretty well source sided, so since they probably weren’t listed in there or else I would’ve found it, maybe they went separately to Sacramento.

Diana (26m 4s):
Right. There you go. Some negative evidence.

Nicole (26m 8s):
Yeah, I’d have to research that more thoroughly. But yeah, yeah,

Diana (26m 11s):
See if you could really use that. All right. Well this has been a fun episode. It’s always so fun to see how we can really make some great discoveries from all the sources that are available to us now online and all of these sources that you used, you just accessed from your home, you didn’t have to go anywhere, do anything, just get on your computer, which is amazing. And so many things now that we can do to write these little stories and do these little snippets for our ancestors. Well, thanks for writing this and thanks everyone for listening. We hope something you heard today helps you make more discoveries on your own family, and we will talk to you next time.

Diana (26m 53s):
Bye-bye. Bye.

Nicole (27m 33s):
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 DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/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.com/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.