Starting With Sarah

 

Our research goal this month is to explore what can be found about my family's connection with the Taliaferros of colonial Virginia. The best way to get started on that goal is simply to begin with what we know. Today, we'll discuss a brief overview of my third great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Taliaferro.

We first crossed her path while finishing up our research project for last month, exploring my connection with the Broyles family of the second Germanna settlement in colonial Virginia, of which Sarah's husband was a descendant. Of course, Sarah's husband was far removed from that 1717 immigrant arrival, not only in time but in generations. Her husband, Ozey Robert Broyles, would have been a great-great-grandchild of the founding immigrant, John Broyles.

Sarah, herself, had deep roots reaching far into our nation's past, thanks to her Taliaferro connections. I already know that in a general way; this month is my opportunity to clean up those inferences with the appropriate documentation.

Sarah lived a life spanning most of the nineteenth century, from her birth in 1803 until her death in 1888. That lifetime was interrupted by a war which ruptured a unique political union forged barely one generation before her birth, when the role which many of her immediate relatives played in birthing that new republic combined with the efforts of so many others. 

Despite her family's traditional Virginia roots, Sarah was born, raised, married, and died in South Carolina. Her family lived in the "up country" around what was once called the Pendleton District, now part of Anderson County. Married to physician Ozey Robert Broyles barely a year after her mother's death in 1822, Sarah was a teenaged bride who eventually bore ten children, eight of whom survived long past their childhood.

Sarah's mother was Margaret Chew Carter, part of the extensive Carter family of colonial Virginia. That family, in and of itself, deserves a month of study, perhaps something to save for next year's Twelve Most Wanted. Margaret likely married Sarah's father, Zachariah Taliaferro, before the two moved from Virginia to South Carolina. Together, Margaret and Zachariah had four daughters, of whom Sarah was the firstborn.

In exploring this Taliaferro line, we'll begin tomorrow with the four daughter of Margaret Chew Carter and Zachariah Taliaferro.