She had one brother, younger than her by one year, named Jesse Richard Cole,[1] who committed suicide by gunshot on 12 November 1895 at Kearney at the age of 67.

When Zerelda was a child, her father broke his neck in a riding accident, leaving her mother with two young children.

Robert James was a commercial hemp farmer, a slave owner, and a popular evangelical minister in the Baptist Church.

Shortly after the birth of his daughter, Susan, Robert James moved to California to preach to the gold miners, where he contracted either pneumonia, cholera or typhoid and died on (according to tradition) August 18, 1850.

Benjamin A. Simms was a wealthy neighbour farmer who was born around 1800 in Virginia,[3] lived in Clinton County, Missouri and left an state there.

[7] "The chief trouble arose from the fact that her three little children, Frank Jesse, and Susie, whom she had always humored and indulged, gave their old step-father no end of annoyance".

The fireplace does not bear burn marks but there is evidence of which floor boards were salvaged and which were replaced when the repairs were made as compensation by Pinkerton to Mrs. James for the death of her son and injury to herself.

[citation needed] Zerelda died in 1911 in the Burlington carriage on a train traveling to San Francisco, California of a heart ailment (some 20 miles outside of Oklahoma City).

She was 86 years old and was buried next to Reuben Samuel, her third husband, and sons Jesse and Archie at Mount Olivet Cemetery, Clay County, Missouri.