Welcome!

This family history site is a work in progress. The internet is a perfect location for this study - accessible to far-flung cousins and easy to update with newly discovered material.  You can contribute by contacting me with stories, photos, documents, or anything that applies to these folks. As well, please let me know of errors or typos on these pages.

 

Who's included?

My Smart, Cox, Wright, and Fernee ancestors and their families. There are no details about living people but their name may appear as a child in the family section of their parents. Because the names are common ones, there are many siblings that I have not traced once they are grown and no longer with their parents.  Hopefully, I will be contacted by present-day people who link into our tree and we can complete more of the picture.

My ancestors are marked with a green tree icon by their names.

People who emigrated are marked with a flag icon       by their names.

Finding a person on the site

Find someone via the surname index, the charts, or the search tab, all accessible from the top menu.

There is an individual page for each person for whom I have a reasonable amount of information, which is arranged as follows:

  • Name and birth/death dates
  • Parents' names
  • An "Extended Family" button which opens up a diagram of the subject's siblings, children, parents, grandparents, and great grandparents
  • Links to charts on which they appear
  • Family section, listing spouse(s) and known children
  • The main section - a chronology of life events
  • Source citations
  • A link to contact me with information, photos, corrections, or just to let me know you are interested! 

 

Other areas to Explore

From the top menu you can also connect to

  • Surname Index - which lists everyone who has their own information page
  • Charts - which illustrate ancestries and descendancies of key people
  • Calendars - just for fun...birthdays and marriages of everyone on this site
  • Images - thumbnails linking to larger images on individual's pages
  • What's New? - major additions and changes to the site

 

Dates & Places

When a person's precise birthdate is unknown but can be approximated from census or other records, it is given as a circa date, which is plus or minus a year or two. Baptism dates often serve as a substitute for birthdates and burial dates often subsitute for death dates. Where the birth or baptism record has not yet been found, there is an approximated or "say" date (which may be off by as much as a decade or two) assigned to provide a general sense of where they belong in time, particularly useful for the index. 

What we now know as London is different than in times gone by.  In 1889 the London County Council was created from the City of London (which was quite small) and metropolitan boroughs taken from portions of the counties of Middlesex, Kent, and Surrey. I have generally called places by their name at the time a record was created. So, someone may have been born in Surrey in 1870 and lived in London in 1900 and it is really the same place.  A further confusion is caused by differing jurisdictions.  Church records are kept by individual churches in ecclesiastical parishes. Census and civil registrations are organized by civil registration districts. 

It is interesting to note how frequently most of these people moved. Seldom is a family at the same address from census to census, or from the baptism of one child to another, so one can imagine how many other moves they might have had during the intervening years.

 

Odds & ends

Anything in [square brackets] is an explanatory note that I have added.

The information displayed on these pages will necessarily change as the research continues and this site is updated. Although great care has been taken, I do not guarantee the accuracy of all information on this website.

By checking the citations, you can see where a particular piece of information was found and evaluate how likely it is to be correct. For instance, a date of birth from a birth certificate is more reliable than one from a census or a published book. I have not cited every source that supports a fact...there might be 3 census records that say a person was born in Pancras but I typically don't cite them all.

If you are using any of the information presented on this site for your own genealogical research, please remember to cite accordingly.  Something along the lines of "Cox Genealogy, online, http://genealogy.kolthammer.org/WrightCox/, accessed date" would be suitable.

If you would like to hear about updates to this site, please contact me.

 

Acknowledgements

  • Numerous correspondents over the past twenty years, as noted in the citations and "What's New" section
  • The developers and supportive user community of The Master Genealogist and Second Site, programs which were used to produce this site.