A Home-Made Christmas!

I still didn't make Irish Potato Pie;

but I started with this . . .

got some paint and hardware cloth . . .

took a nice vintage metal art piece with flowers and butterflies . . .

added some silk flowers

Voila!

Death Certificate for Jesse Cox

Karen kindly supplied us with a copy of this document, which she obtained from the Maryland Archives in Annapolis.

Since we don't know who Jesse Cox's parents are, we were hoping this information would be reported on his death certificate.  Unfortunately, it is not.    It shows that Jesse was born in Caroline County, Maryland on January 13, 1856, but his parents are listed as "Unknown".  (The birthdate on his grave marker is January 15.) The informant on the death certificate is his oldest son, Thomas A. Cox.

Jesse Cox died on January 7, 1933 at 8:13 p.m, and was buried at the Upper Bambury Cemetery on January 9th.  His occupation is listed as "Waterman", from which he had been retired for 10 years.

We have recorded his name as "John L. or Jesse" Cox in our blog posts, because of popular family belief that his name was John.  However, in all of the documentation we have found so far, his name is listed as "Jesse", not "John".   In some brief social items from the Denton Journal, he is referred to as Mr. J. L. Cox.

A Perfect Summer Day

A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing,
the birds are singing and the lawnmower is broken!
                                             James Dent

                                            

Whereever there is magic and make believe and an audience ,there's theatre.
Gary Merill as Bill Sampson

Memories

     Grandfather Cox (J. Lacy) died a couple of months before my fifth birthday, so my memories of him are quite limited.  I do, however, remember going down to Bruceville to visit him and Grandmother (Mary, "Manie") at different times.  My parents (Carl, "Car", and Martha, "Mattie") would take us to visit sometimes on weekends.  Back then, in the early 1930s, it seemed quite a long journey to take in Papa's 1929 green Model A Ford (complete with running boards!).  Actually, it was probably less than ten miles.
     Their house was small.  There was a kitchen and a parlor.  I don't remember if there was another room or if all the "visiting" was done in the kitchen.  Certainly the parlor was NOT used for casual socializing!  The one piece of furniture that stands out in my memory was a pump organ which held a place of honor in the parlor.  Back in those days, the parlor was used for laying out the dead, and for really important company, such as the preacher.  I don't remember ever going up the stairs, so I don't know if there was only one room or more, but I believe it probably would have been two rooms.  There was no indoor plumbing.  The "bathroom" was an outhouse toward the back of the lot.  I can remember a catalog being there -- the pages of it were used as toilet paper.  There was an outdoor well, from which water was obtained.
     Though the house was very humble and plain, the yard was beautiful.  Grandmother truly had a "green thumb".  I remember small pink roses (probably wild roses, but they were so pretty and they smelled SO nice), hollyhocks, and so many other flowers.  Between the front yard and the road was a ditch.  There were boards laid across the ditch for driving into the driveway, and there was a little wooden bridge for walking across the ditch to the mailbox.  In the backyard, there was a glider-type swing with two seats, each large enough to hold a couple of adults. I can remember Grandfather taking me out and swinging with me while the others visited.  I guess that is my only real memory of him.
      I have a few more memories of Grandmother, since she lived until I was almost thirteen.  I never saw her without an apron on, and her aprons weren't the fancy kind.  Many of them were made of checked gingham.  They tied around the waist and went almost to the floor.   She spent several months with us during the winter of 1940-41.  We had a warm spell - a false spring - and she insisted on going back to Bruceville to her own home.  Then it turned real cold again, she got sick and died in February.
      They are both buried in Upper Bambury Cemetery.

  --  by Hazel Satchell (1928-2003),
granddaughter of J. Lacy and Mary E. Cox,

part of a letter sent about 1998.

Snapshot

J. L. and Mary E Cox, with grandchildren Dot and Cliff Buckley, about 1928

Quote Of The Day

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
--Winston Churchill