Was doing some research on our broken link, good old James Ziba Cochran.  I stumbled onto this interesting tidbit:

In 1862 my maternal great-grandfather, Jake and Dice’s son, Peter Akles, enlisted in the 89th Ohio regiment of the Union army and went off to war, leaving my great grandmother Amanda (Morford) Akles and their two daughters, Melinda and Margaret, in Higgensport, Ohio. Grandfather Akles never returned. He was captured in the battle of Chickamauga, Georgia, sent to Belle Isle which is in the middle of the river at Richmond, Virginia and later he was sent to the Union prison at Danville, Virginia. He died there of variola (smallpox). There is a Union cemetery at Danville. Peter Akles name is not listed as being interred there in the records of the cemetery, but his service record states that is where he died. In other words, he is buried in an unmarked grave. My mother was quite put out when I informed her of this. The family tale was that Peter Akles had died in the infamous Andersonville prison in Georgia.

Peter Akles wife, Amanda Moreford was left with two daughters, Margaret and Melinda. Amanda then married James Cochran of Brown County, who had some children of his own. They moved to Brownville, Nebraska. Cochran turned out to be a shiftless, lazy, drunk. Amanda would spend the remainder of her life living a hand to mouth existence supporting her new husband and daughters as a cook in various hotels in the area.

I’m updating my play chart to reflect this while I hunt down records that confirm this story.  (I keep a “working” chart using MyHeritage.com so I can record families like this and try to compare them to other trees of people using the same site.  Keeps me from muddying up the GedCom with my own unverified data.)

So the timelines and locations match perfectly.  It doesn’t solve our main problem of identifying James Ziba’s parents, but it gives us another sideways trail.

Here’s the link to the source I found.