Cook-Keys Connections
As you all may recall, my great great grandmother was Martha Ann Cook Keys. She was the brave widow woman who immigrated to America with her five young children in 1887. Her daughter was Daisy Keys who married Harry Clifton Phenice. One of their daughters’ name was Myrtle Phenice and she married Fred Bucklin. Myrtle and Fred’s second daughter was my mother Betty Lou Bucklin Landry. That tells you my connection to the Cook-Keys family, but let’s look a little further back.
Martha was married to Henry Keys in 1869 in Middlesex, England. But they were not the first Cook-Keys couple. Martha’s younger sister Henrietta had married Henry’s younger brother William in 1861 and shortly afterwards started a family. Their children were double first cousins to each other. That meant that they had more DNA in common than most first cousins. This helps us now because it increases the chances that 4th cousins of these couples still share DNA.
And they do. That’s what made me think of this post for this week. I started corresponding with two different descendants of Henrietta and William Keys. And since I always like to see photos of my ancestors, I thought I’d share the ones I have. I thought some of you might like to see some of this information as well.
This is a photo of Henrietta Cook Keys. My ancestry program identifies her as my great, great, great aunt. What I really appreciate about her is that she kept a diary and wrote about some of her and Martha’s family history. How cool is that? Too bad they didn’t have blogs back in her day. We might have seen even more information!
She talked about her father Job Cook dying when she was young (less than a year old). He was a sea captain who was “free of the river” and who had traveled the world. He died after voyaging to India. On his way home he was seized with pain in the head. Since they were so close to home, the doctor had already left the ship. The sailors tried to help him by cutting the hair off of the top of his head and applying some type of poultice. His situation only grew worse and he died only an hour after returning to shore. Supposedly if they had applied the ‘blister’ to the back of the head rather than the top of the head, he would have survived.
Henrietta says in her diary that she had in her possession the letter that brought her mother the sad news of her husband’s death. Now that’s a letter I’d like to see! There are other things that she refers to that I wish she had gone into more detail about. She talked about how her mother Ruth Horsnell ran a private school to make money. And it sounds like the dress shop that Martha had was partly run by their mother. Henrietta herself was not put to a business because a family friend had decided that she was “delicate.” She doesn’t look so delicate in this photo, but looks can be deceiving.
Henrietta also identified her paternal grandfather as William Cook and talks about his grave in Walthamstow, England. She was living there when she wrote the journal and she talked about people recognizing her as part of the Cook family. William had also been a seaman and died at a young age. Henrietta was certain that there was a connection between her Cook family and that of the famous sea captain James Cook.
All of this information was in the book that cousin Edith Keys Segraves put together in 1980. She, like Henrietta, was also pretty sure of the connection, though she was never able to find a link. She said that she included the information and the diary in hopes that someone in the family will one day find that link.
The search continues…
To see the diary pages that I have a copy of, see this link.