Sarah Ann Cook was my great-great-grandmother, the mother of my great-grandfather and namesake Joe Cook (Joseph Eli Cook), and of his siblings George, Katie, and Plassie Cook. She was the widow of James Council Cook. Sarah lived to be 95 years old and was a celebrated member of the Liberty community in Autauga County, Alabama. Birthday parties in her honor were an annual community event, covered by the local newspaper, the Prattville Progress, in her later years. My grandmother Sarah, her namesake, remembered her.
When I started doing family history years ago, naïve to family traditions, I identified her maiden name as “Sarah Ann Bullard,” which is what her 1866 marriage license to James Cook says. My Grandmother Sarah later corrected me that her grandmother’s maiden name was Bazzell. And yes, it was well known, she was the sister of Mary Jane, Hannah, and Eliza Bazzell. Eliza was the wife of James Newton “Newt” Cook, a community midwife and the namesake of our aunt Eliza Catherine Cook (who later changed her name to Elza Katheryn). Hannah was the wife of Sion Cook — Sion and Newt both older brothers of Joe Cook. So Sarah, as the wife of James Cook, was the stepmother of her own brothers-in-law; or, Joe’s brothers married their step-aunts. In the old, 1905 family reunion photo we have of the Cooks, the Bazzell sisters are all standing next to each other arm-in-arm.
But Sarah’s identity proved a little more complicated than that. Her mother, Hannah Oates, didn’t marry Robert Counsel Bazzell until 1845, and Sarah was born in 1842. Hannah had previously been married, in 1838, to a man named Daniel McNeil. We don’t know much about Mr. McNeil. Bankruptcy notices appear for him in Alabama newspapers in 1842 and 1843, and it appears he may have died — or maybe skipped town. We assumed, for a long time, that he was Sarah’s actual father.
But when we started doing DNA genealogy, we found that my grandmother had a curious lack of DNA matches with people named McNeil. All her other families were represented by matches, but — no McNeil. Instead, we started finding very strong matches to people named… Bullard. That name again, from the marriage license. We looked further, and it turned out that on the Alabama death certificates of all four of Sarah Ann Cook’s children, Joe, George, Katie, and Plassie, informants reported that their mother’s maiden name was Sarah Ann Bullard.
The deeper I dug into the DNA, the clearer it became: Sarah Ann’s actual father was William Riley Bullard, the son of William Jefferson Bullard, who, in the 1840s, was the next-door neighbor of Stephen Oates, Hannah Oates’ father. Hannah was back living in her father’s home, and, however it happened, she had a daughter, Sarah, fathered by William Riley Bullard.
There are two very strange things about this: one, it seems to have been an acknowledged fact in the community, and Sarah grew up with the name Bullard, even though Hannah and William Bullard were never married. And two, why weren’t they married? William Riley Bullard was a single man. The expected thing, especially at that time, would have been for two people who were going to have a baby to get married. Was Hannah still legally married to Daniel McNeil? Did the parents, either of Hannah or William, disapprove of the match? William Riley Bullard married Eliza Ann Norris in 1844, who, it appears, was his cousin. Had this been prearranged, and something his parents expected to happen? Hannah (Oates) McNeil married Robert C. Bazzell in 1845. William Riley Bullard moved to Mississippi and later Louisiana, where he died in 1873.
Rather than a shameful event that was hushed, Sarah Ann Bullard seems to have carried her father’s name with no stigma, and the community, even knowing that she was a Bazzell sister, remembered that she was also a Bullard, even 120 years later when Joe, George, and Katie Cook passed on.
Sarah Ann (Bullard) Cook passed away on 11 Nov 1937 and was buried in the Liberty Cemetery.