Annie Corene (Farrell) Cox – family history video (YT)
Last year I found an audio cassette that turned out to be my great-grandma Corene Cox providing a family history from 1987. It covered the Farrell, Raper, and Cox families, growing up in Mississippi and Oklahoma. I had the tape digitized last year. I didn’t want to just throw the audio up online somewhere (it was 24 minutes), I wanted the material to be discoverable so I set off trying to transcribe everything. The tape was noisy and scratchy, AI-based transcriptions fell flat on their face and I realized I would have to do it by hand.
I spent hours listening to the audio on headphones, rewinding over spots over and over to make sure I understood it as I was typing. I had to build out entire swaths of family on the family tree to make sure I heard the names and dates right. Eventually I got the idea to adapt the audio into a video version but instead of some boring waveform visualization, I’d splice in real family photos to go along with the names. After all, I had scanned hundreds of family photos and I could cover most people with something.
This turned into a whole project I worked on and off of for a year. It took a while to find good photos, especially of couples. I did not want to ruin the risk of copyright or photos of questionable origin so I only used photos that I personally scanned. On top of photos I spliced in screenshots of sections of family trees from Ancestry. I tried to keep it simple, I did not want some gaudy contraption with music jammed in and screams graphics design is my passion to overload the simple narration. Finally I got a rough cut together then spent some time redoing half of it so everything looked consistent.
I posted the raw audio and transcript earlier this year up on my Documents/Genealogy page just to get it out there. Yesterday I finally finished the video (done is better than perfect) and uploaded to YouTube.
Some highlights:
- Growing up in Guntown, Mississippi
- Living in Calvin, Lindsay, Fish Creek, Kinta, Oklahoma
- Henderson Raper and Arminda Kent having four and two children, respectively, from a previous marriage, then having TEN MORE children together (I mean it was a post-war plantation).
- Picking 200 pounds of cotton to pay for wedding dress, hat, and shoes
- Getting married to Will Cox (W.R. Cox) in 1916
- Will Cox delivering the mail in Kinta with carriage driven by a blind horse
- Losing their son Billy Joe Cox in WWII
- A sister getting a splinter under her fingernail from floor boards (no carpet) and losing the first digit of her finger
- 50 years of church attendance
- Visiting every US capitol, Canada, and Mexico
As I’ve noted a few times, some of her history sounds familiar to an article that came out a couple years later in a book two years later called “History of Haskell County Oklahoma – Indian Territory 1988”. The article cites it all came from an audiotape provided by Corene, but there’s details in the book that aren’t in this version. So, I dunno if there was another version produced or they just supplemented it with additional interviews.
There’s somebody in the audio there helping Corene read material but I don’t recognize who it is. I’m pretty sure it’s not Inez, although she can be heard laughing in the room at the very end of the tape. It could be somebody from the Haskell County Historical Society doing the interview or could be one of her sisters, I have no idea.
