Sarah — Mrs. Thomas Bartlett
also known as Sarah ( ), recorded without a surname
Sarah is the woman at the top of a thirteen-child household and the bottom of an empty column.
On the Family Group Record that Robert Earl Wildermuth printed on 11 July 1990, her line reads WIFE SARAH-0315 and then, down the page: Born: blank. Chr.: blank. Died: blank. Bur.: blank. Father: blank. Mother: blank. Every field on her half of the sheet is empty. The typed sketch on the accompanying page does the same thing more visibly — “Thomas married Sarah ( )” — leaving the parenthesis open where the surname should go.
The family GEDCOM, synced from FamilySearch, adds two approximations and no name: born about 1758 in Virginia, died about 1825 in Preston County, and a marriage about 1783 in Fauquier County, Virginia. FamilySearch files her under her husband’s surname, which is what genealogists do when they have nothing else.
What can be said is what the household implies. She married Thomas Bartlett in the Piedmont, east of the Blue Ridge, and went west with him over the Alleghenies in the years after the Revolution. She raised thirteen children in the Glades of what is now Preston County, West Virginia — nine daughters and sons whose marriages the record does preserve, and four sons about whom it says nothing but their names. Her eldest recorded daughter, Nancy, married Thomas Bailey in Monongalia County in October 1803; a second daughter, Mary “Polly,” married another Bailey three years later. Chuck’s descent runs through Nancy.
She is one of several women in this archive who are known to have existed, known to have been essential, and known by one name only — alongside Hannah Thornsberry’s husband J.B.Y. Bailey, whose initials Robert Earl could not even resolve.
Source: the Bartlett Family Group Record and sketch, compiled by Robert Earl Wildermuth, 11 July 1990.
