Isaac Cox

1716-1783

Born 1716

Died 1783

Children include Nancy, Lt.

Isaac Cox was born about 1716. A family history published in 1948 says he and his brothers Gabriel and Friend Cox came to America about 1740, and family tradition makes their parents Scotch-Irish refugees living in Switzerland. He first appears in the foothills of the Maryland Alleghenies. About 1750 he moved with his brothers to the South Branch of the Potomac, in the country that became Hampshire County, Virginia, in 1753.

He married Susannah Tomlinson, and they had twelve children: James, John, Isaac, David, Gabriel, George, Nancy, Ann, Polly, Joseph, and the twins Jonathan and Benjamin. The children married into the neighboring families of the same valleys. Two of the sons, Isaac and Gabriel, married Enoch daughters, and David married Margaret Bruce.

In the early 1770s the family moved north and west to the upper Ohio, where the Coxes built three forts in Ohio and Yohogania counties. The frontier took a heavy toll. James ran off at eighteen to hunt Indians for the colony's scalp bounty and was shot by mistake, in Indian dress, coming home to the family fort in Hampshire County. Joseph was killed by Indians in 1780 on the way down the Ohio to Kentucky. Isaac, a colonel who left nearly twelve thousand acres, was killed by Indians in Kentucky in 1788. Ann's husband, Maj. William McMahon, was killed at Fort Recovery in 1794.

Isaac Cox died in 1783, by family accounts near Wellsburg on the Ohio. His sons David, Isaac and Benjamin had already founded Cox's Station on Cox's Creek in Kentucky. His estate was settled in Nelson County, Kentucky, in 1800, when nine of the family were living to share it: his widow Susannah and the children John, David, Gabriel, Polly, Jonathan and Benjamin in Kentucky, and George and Ann on the upper Ohio. Through Ann and David he stands twice in the same line: Ann's son Friend McMahon married David's daughter Margaret in 1798.

Children

Nancy Ann Cox 1757-1818 Lt. David Cox 1746-1820

Sources

Will of Isaac Cox, 15 September 1786, proved 8 April 1788, Nelson County, Kentucky, will book pages 42 to 45

David Hall, "Col. Isaac Cox moves West," The Kentucky Standard, Bardstown, Kentucky, April 1985; clipping photographed on Find a Grave memorial 277061236

Evelyn Crady Adams, "The Coxes of Cox's Creek, Kentucky," Filson Club History Quarterly, volume 22 (1948), reprinted in Nelson L. Dawson, Genealogies of Kentucky Families from the Filson Club History Quarterly (1981), pages 442 to 470; David Hall, "Col. Isaac Cox Moves West," Kentucky Standard, 1985

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Cite: Heirology, "Isaac Cox (1716-1783)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/isaac-cox-1716-1783-d358cd.