All the children in this family are commonly reported (e.g., by Elza Cox and by Dorothy Burnett Peterson) to be the children of Luke Cox and Sarah “Sally” Worrell, even though they were all born before 1840, and Luke did not marry Sally until 1841. Also Sally’s first husband John C. Phillips did not die until 1835 or 1836.

The reason is that many of them, on either their marriage record or death record (as reported by descendants, of course), record their parents as Luke and Sally Cox. So until the 1841 marriage bond for Luke and Sally was discovered, researchers naturally took those records at face value. It now appears that Luke’s children were reporting their stepmother as their mother, a fairly common practice of the time.

(The death date for Katherine Hylton is not known, so it is possible that Luke and Sally were already a couple before they were officially married, and that Ruth is their daughter. But it isn’t very likely.)