Job's Children

The Children of Zilphia Cochran: William Marshall Cochran I have just finished writing a story on a lady named Zilphia Cochran, whom I was able to trace from her birth into slavery on the homeplace of Mr Abraham B. Cochran and his wife Mary Marshall Lilly Cochran, in what was at the time, Allenton, Stanly County, NC around 1834, to Montgomery Count... y, NC and the Zion area, where her young mistress, the Widow Cochran, had married attorney James Lowe Gaines. After freedom, Zilphia would return to Stanly County and marry a man nearly 20 years her senior, Ben Davis, a man who had been the slave of my own Davis ancestors. Ben and Zilphia had no children together, as he was 62 and she 46 upon their marriage. However, Ben had several children during his long marriage with his first wife, Fanny. Not so fortunate, Zilphia had had at least 6 children, 3 sons and 3 daughters, with several different men, which is in no way a reflection of morality, or lack of it, on her part. Her youngest daughter, Martha, was born in 1865, so all of Zilphia's pregnancies had occurred during her status as a slave. Two of her children are by Unknown fathers. They could have been one of the other fathers of the known ones, or someone else completely. Neither Zilphia, or any of her children, are ever referred to in the census records, or any other records as 'mulatto', or of mixed race. Zilphia and her children seem to have been of purely African decent. The fathers of her children that are known, were all mostly older men in the same communities where Zilphia had lived. Two years after the death of Abraham (or Abram) Bruton Cochran, a son of David Cochran and Catherine Butler Cochran, in 1844, a probate of his property was made in Montgomery County, where he had spent his younger years. His widow, Mary, had married Attorney Gaines and went to live at his estate in the Zion Community of Pee Dee Township, taking her two surviving daughters, Mary Catherine, called Katie, and Martha Louisa, called Louisa. She left two children, Eliza and ...Read More