About Sarah

 

Sometimes a bird-in-hand moment makes for better research progress than searching for a more advantageous starting point. Right now, that's my situation with Rosanna Jackson Mitchell's youngest daughter Sarah. While I am not sure about the other two Mitchell daughters, Sarah was the one who was most findable, so we'll look at a few details about Sarah to start us down our path of exploring this newly-found matrilineal descent from my mother-in-law's third great-grandmother, Sarah Howard Ijams.

While it is true that Sarah Howard Ijams' newly found daughter Rosanna had at least three daughters, Rosanna's youngest daughter, presumably named Sarah after her maternal grandmother, could be found in every federal census record from the one following her 1862 birth to the one just preceding her 1939 death—something I can't exactly say for the other two. Just those documents alone tell quite a bit of this youngest Mitchell daughter's life story. Whether this daughter had daughters of her own to continue that matriline to the next generation will be our task to discover today.

Born in Chickasaw County, Iowa, Sarah's life remained in that same county for decades afterwards. She appeared with her father in the 1870 census after her (presumed) mother's death in 1862. By 1880, she had been married to Arthur Nugent for nearly three years and already had a son named William. While the gap left by the loss of the 1890 census cost us some missing segments of Sarah's story, with the 1900 census, we can see Sarah listed as a widow with six children, by then living in Wright County, Iowa.

Even bigger changes awaited Sarah in the subsequent decade, for she and several of her children moved from Iowa to California. The 1910 census showed her living in Sacramento with her youngest three children. There she remained for the 1920 census, as well. It was only by the time of the 1930 census that Sarah, still in Sacramento County, had moved to live with her son Francis and his growing family.

One specific detail jumps to our attention when examining all those census records: the fact that Sarah, youngest daughter of Rosanna Jackson Mitchell, had daughters of her own. That detail resonates, as our purpose in this exploration of the Mitchell family is to trace all possible lines of descent from the matriline tying Rosanna's daughters to the daughters in my mother-in-law's own ancestry. According to Sarah Mitchell Nugent's obituary, she had two married daughters to survive her: Anna, wife of Orville S. Carr, and Mary Elizabeth, wife of Francis T. Harrigan.

Our next task, then, will be see if we can trace that same matriline through yet another generation, in search of possible matches to the mtDNA test results representing my mother-in-law's own line.