Sarah - Who Are You? - Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

Randy Seaver challenged geneabloggers to explore their ancestors named Sarah LNU (or last name unknown) as part of his Saturday Night Genealogy Fun series.

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music):

1)  I have many females in my family tree database without a last name.  One of those female first names is "Sarah."  Do you have situations like this, where you don't know the surname of some females? [I call them LNU persons - Last Name Unknown.]

I have over 50 females named Sarah for whom I do not know their surname. I gave up counting after fifty. 
2) How many "Sarah" persons without a surname do you have in your genealogy database?  How many of them are your ancestor?  

I was only counting ancestors so...probably over 100 Sarahs total and over 50 related to me! Many are second wives of many times great-grandfathers, wives of uncles, etc. so they are not direct line ancestors. 
3)  If you have one that is your ancestor, have you looked recently to determine if there are more records online that might lead you to her surname?  Go look for one - you might be surprised!

4)  Tell us about your Sarah LNU ancestors with no surname.  Perhaps someone will read it and help you out!
Can you help me solve these??  

I'm going to try to solve 2 Sarah mysteries in this post. I'd love it if someone has information on these two Sarahs. 

1. Sarah married to Richard Pope (?-1694). This is an early Maine family and records are hard to find. No luck with records on FamilySearch and limited, unhelpful hints on Ancestry. My data originally came from the book, Old Kittery and her Families, available on archive.org. 

2. Sarah married Eleazer Higgins (1697-1743). They lived in Eastham, Massachusetts. A search on Ancestry reveals a tree where she is called Sarah Rush but has no sources for this fact. The rest of the tree is fairly well-sourced compared to many trees on the site. I couldn't find anything on FamilySearch. This is my original source for the basic information. 

26. “Richard Higgins, a resident and pioneer settler at Plymouth and Eastham, Massachusetts and at Piscataway, New Jersey, and his descendants,” Katharine Elizabeth Chapin Higgins, Worcester, Massachusetts: Higgins, 1918.

5)  Share your information in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or on Facebook or Google+.

6)  NOTE:  If you don't have any "Sarah" persons without a surname, then pick another female first name.

Well, I sure didn't have that problem! 

Law & Order in Plymouth Colony

This is a reposting of something I wrote in 2012. 
There is nothing more horrifying than the violent death of child. On July 22, 1648, the bloody body of a four year old child was discovered in her Plymouth home...

Alice Martin was married to her second husband, Richard Bishop and had three small children in her home. Abigail & Martha Clark were daughters from her first marriage and she had a daughter, Damaris, with Richard. 



A neighbor, Rachel (Eaton) Ramsden, came by the Bishop home on the morning and saw

Martha sleeping in the loft with no apparent injury. Alice Bishop sent Rachel to fetch some buttermilk from the Winslow home and when Rachel returned she noticed blood at the foot of the ladder and asked Alice about it. Alice pointed to the loft and "bid [Rachel to] look." Frightened that Martha was dead, Rachel ran to tell her parents. When the Plymouth Coroners entered the Bishop home, they saw the blood at the bottom of the ladder and found Martha dressed in her shift and lying on her left side. Her throat has been slashed multiple times, severing her windpipe. There was a knife lying beside the dead child. Alice confessed to the murder of her daughter. She would repeat her confession on August 1st. 

The trial was held in October 1648 and Alice was found guilty of willful murder and sentenced to be hanged. Unfortunately, the records leave many unanswered questions. The obvious question is what motive did Alice have to kill her daughter but I also wonder where the rest of the family was when the murder occurred. Check out this blog for a more thorough treatment of this case. The author has graciously allowed me to base this post off her extensive research. 


Given the relatively small population of Plymouth at the time, estimated between 1500-2000, it is not surprising to find a number of connections between my family and this case. Both the Cotton and the Yates lines have multiple connections to the early Plymouth settlers. 

Cotton: 
Rachel Eaton Ramsden - the neighbor who reported the murder - 10th Great Grandaunt

Members of the Petit Jury
John Howland - 12th Great Grandfather
Giles Rickard - husband of 11th Great Grandaunt
Thomas Pope - husband of another 11th Great Grandaunt 
Francis Billington - 2nd husband of 11th Great Grandmother & Rachel's step-father

Members of the Grand Jury
John Dunham - 10th Great Grandfather
Daniel Cole - 11th Great Grandfather

Yates:
Members of the Petit Jury
James Cole - 10th Great Grandfather
James Hurst - 10th Great Grandfather
John Shaw - 10th Great Grandfather

Members of the Grand Jury
Ephraim Hicks - 10th Great Granduncle
Love Brewster - husband of 10th Great Grandaunt

Sources:
http://alicemartinbishop.com/