Quickly learning that genealogy can be addictive, I spent the next five evenings between arriving at home and bedtime, digging into the past. I found my way around Ancestry.com quickly and discovered how difficult it can be to solve the tiniest of mysteries. On my Grandfather, Wallace Cox’s side, I couldn’t get past the fact no one seemed to know his mother, Emma Cox’s maiden name. I hit a wall that couldn’t be scaled. It would have been so simple to ask, “Hey Granddaddy, what was your Mom’s maiden name?” But I never did, and all those who would have know it, have also died. I’ve sent out some emails and will come back to solve that problem later.
With that problem unresolved, I jumped over to the Bynum side and traced the family’s migration from John Bainham’s voyage from England to Surry, Virginia in 1616 at the age of 26. Spelling was more phonetic back then and the name eventually changed to Bynum. Each generation seemed to want a new place. There were relocations from Surry, Isle of Wight County Virginia, to Abermarle, North Carolina by 1746, then Pendleton County, South Carolina in 1781. Isaac Newton Bynum(1757-1845) moved to Maynard’s Cove, in Jackson County, Alabama, after the Indians had been driven out. His ancentors moved on to Blount and Dekalb Counties.
The name Isaac Newton Bynum intriqued me so I decided to go to Maynard’s Cove to take a picture of his grave marker as a primary photo in my genealogy list. With the help of Google maps I found the cove near Scottsboro, Alabama, which was only a two hour drive. Google also marked the cemetery halfway around the loop of highway 28 which was the main road through the cove. All too easy I thought…
Not wanting to seem overly excited about a road trip to a cemetery, I suggested that we make a shopping trip to an old favorite store we visited several years ago called “Unclaimed Baggage” in downtown Scottsboro. That worked well, so the next weekend four of us went shopping with only a quick side trip on the agenda for Maynard’s Cove.
The shopping stop was a dissappointment with zero good buys. I was hoping the Cove wouldn’t be another. We followed E. Willow St. and turned left on Tupelo Road which is County Highway 21. The road was narrow leaving Scottsboro and gave me the feeling the asphalt would soon turn into dirt, but it did not. About ten minutes out of town the scenery opened up to wide vista’s between two or three mountains of the Appalachian chain. We stopped a couple of times for pictures then turned right on County Road 28. It was nice scenery all the way and I understood why it would have been a great place to settle in.
We
stopped near an old farmhouse to take pictures and suddenly realized
there were no man-made noises. It was awesome. Another discovery a
minute later was there were no bars on the cell phone, again, to me
awesome!
Everyone enjoyed the trip to one of our families historical sites. We did not find the cemetery on that trip and being pushed for time, had to start home. We finished the Highway 28 loop and turned right on Highway 33 and headed toward the town of Hollywood and Highway 72. On Highway 33, we quickly were back in civilization with many run down homes and a trailer park which had seen better days. I was thinking that time seemed to have slowed down, maybe even rewound a bit while we were in the Cove. That’s about when then the cooling towers of Belefonte Nuclear power plant came into view, a startling reminder that time and progress march on.
Judy and I went back to the Cove the following Saturday when we had more time and I did my research properly. I’ll tell you about that next time.
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