Thanks

I became curious about my family's genealogy during the Fall of 2000. A mathematics question from my older daughter Katherine caused me to consider how little I knew about my ancestors. My curiosity somehow became excited by the prospect of delving back in time to search out these long-departed people. At the beginning, my knowledge about them consisted of the names of my deceased paternal and maternal grandparents, some vague notions concerning the Stubbs and Pate families, and some genealogy that my mother had done several years ago on the Manuel and Main family lines.

From these beginnings, the present document arose and has been continuously updated. During the research, data for over 700 people were tracked in order to piece together a reasonably comprehensive and internally consistent genealogy. Of course such a study is never finished and surely will contain errors, but I believe what is collected here is a tolerably good start. I hope the results prove interesting, and will be helpful for those to come; the study has been a source of much personal reflection for me. My objective has been to provide a rigorously provable genealogy, relying as far as possible on objective data from census, land, probate and other non-speculative sources. However, I have also not slavishly used such sources when erroneous information could be discerned, and I generally comment on such instances.

Several people have been very helpful in researching some of the lines. My mother, Nell Manuel Cox, began working on her family history in the 1990s. Her research made use of visits to the South Caroliniana Library (Columbia, SC) as well as personal conversations with her brothers and sisters. She also helped me locate records and pension data for numerous family members who served in the Civil War. This proved especially valuable for discovering the fate of Solomon Cox.

My sister Gayle Cox Sneed and her husband Jim Sneed very early on became the "field research" experts. Together, they made extremely useful photographic surveys of cemeteries that often provided clues for resolving mysteries and ambiguities. Some of the burial sites they visited can best be described as inaccessible, and most of the cemetery photographs cited in this study are from their efforts. Gayle was a professional librarian, and she greatly assisted in getting access to South Carolina materials.

Libraries that were used in this work included the Library of Congress, the Virginia Room of the Fairfax, VA public library, and the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina.