Kentucky: A History of the State, Battle, Perrin, & Kniffin, 5th ed., 1887, Franklin Co. STEPHEN BLACK was born in Franklin County, Ky., April 3, 1827. His father, Charles C. Black, was born and reared in Madison County, Ky., near Richmond; his mother, Jane Roach, was born in Culpeper County, Va., and moved early in life with her parents, Simeon and Jane Roach, to South Carolina, near Columbia, where she was reared, and married twice; first to Jesse Cox, of South Carolina, and then to C. C. Black, about the year 1818. C. C. Black was a mechanic, "wagon-maker to trade", afterward a horse trader; went from Kentucky to South Carolina, where he was married and lived a short time; returned to Kentucky in the year 1821, bought land and settled on North Elkhorn Creek, three miles up from the Forks of Elkhorn, where he farmed with twenty-five or thirty slaves, and drove horses South till [sic] his death in 1839. Mrs. S. Black's grandfather, Simeon Roach, died in South Carolina, and her grandmother moved with her daughter and family to Kentucky, where she died at a very old age about the year 1844. Owing to his father's early death Stephen Black had but little chance to get an education, but finally succeeded, however, in getting a fair knowledge of the English language and mathematics. At the age of twenty he taught a country school two five-months' sessions, and later, in the fall of 1848, went one trip to North Carolina, trading in horses and mules; after that was engaged in farming till [sic] 1852, when he engaged in the coal business in Frankfort, Ky., for A. W. Macklin and J. C. Gale three years; then went into the business for himself in 1855, which he carried on till [sic] 1884, and now has his coal yard property leased out. In 1864 he bought the old family residence and farm of 400 acres. In the fall of the same year, November 29, he was married to Lydia Macklin, youngest daughter of A. W. Macklin, and lived at the old homestead two years from 1865 to 1867, when he moved to the present residence, Silver Lake Stock Farm, three miles east of Frankfort, on the Georgetown Turnpike Road, a place inherited by his wife from her father's estate, and is now engaged principally in the horse and Jersey cattle business with his only surviving child, a son, Howard Black, who was twenty years old last September. Silver Lake Stock Farm is the home of the great trotting stallion Pretender. Black Roach Macklin Gale Cox = Richmond-Madison-KY Culpeper-VA SC NC http://www.rootsweb.com/~kygenweb/kybiog/franklin/black.s.txt