Elias Cockrell
Elias Cockrell was born in South Carolina about 1788. His older children were born there, the eldest of them about 1822, and his younger ones in Alabama from about 1829. So the family came west in the 1820s, when the Black Belt counties along the Tombigbee and the Black Warrior were filling with settlers from the Carolinas. He settled in Greene County.
The census of 1850 reached his house late. The assistant marshal, F. P. Strother, was still counting Greene County in the first week of January 1851, and he wrote down the household on the 4th. Elias was 62, a farmer born in South Carolina, owning land worth 120 dollars. He was marked among the grown people of the house who could not read or write. With him were Susan, 60, and Jina, 28, both born in South Carolina, and four born in Alabama: Thomas, 21, and William, 18, both laborers, Binum, 16, and Julia A., 14. The census names no relationships.
The houses on either side were Cockrells too. Next door was Sandford Cockrell, 26, a laborer born in Alabama, with Martha, 18, and a young North Carolina laborer named Carter Jones. Beyond them lived Hannah Cockrell, 30, with Jane, 16, Martha, 12, Rufus, 8, and Margaret, 5.
A history of the Coleman family of Greene County says that "Susan Colvin married Elias Cockrell," which makes the Susan of the 1850 household a Colvin. A descendant of his daughter Julia Ann Elizabeth, writing in a Shreveport newspaper's genealogy column in the 1960s or later, named Julia's parents as Elias Cockrell and Martha Colvin. So the family remembered the surname, and the given name Martha may have come from an older Martha Feaster Colvin of the same county, whom the Coleman history also names. No marriage record for Elias has been found. Colvins lived close by: three Colvin families were about thirty houses up the road, and a Colvin household elsewhere in the county was headed by a Binam Colvin, the same uncommon name Elias gave a son.
Also thirty houses up the road, in 1850, lived Thomas A. Lyles, a young farmer from South Carolina with a wife and two small children. His wife died soon after. On 18 November 1854 the probate judge of Greene County issued a license for "Mr Thomas A Lisles" to marry "Miss Julia A E Cockrell," and they were married that month by a justice of the peace. In 1857 Julia Ann went with him to Jackson Parish, Louisiana, where she raised nine children.
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Cite: Heirology, "Elias Cockrell (b. 1788)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/elias-cockrell-1788-f36e02.