Ancestors

Ephraim Sargeant

Born on 10 June 1822. Where is a question the records answer two ways: the 1850, 1860 and 1880 censuses of Cherokee County, Georgia say South Carolina, and the 1870 and 1900 censuses of the same county say Georgia. The 1900 return, which asked for month and year, gives June 1822.

He was in Cherokee County before he was thirty and he never left it. The tax digest of 1849 already carries him, entered surname first as Sargent Ephraim, in Captain Edward's district.

He married four times and buried three wives. In 1850 he is twenty eight, in a house with a wife called Elizabeth J., twenty three and South Carolina born, a two year old daughter Mary L. and a newborn son William P. She was Elizabeth J. Hunt, whom he had married on 9 January 1845, and she died on 16 April 1855. On 6 November 1855 he married Mary J. Baker, and the licence and the minister's return are both written into the county marriage book. All four of the children on the 1870 page were born of that marriage. Mary died on 16 April 1867, and on 21 August 1867 he took out a third licence, for Miss Martha E. Barnett, signed by the ordinary W. R. D. Moss. Martha was dead within nine months.

In 1870 the household in District 817 is five: his fourth wife, Sarah Elizabeth Boring, entered as Elizabeth, aged about twenty five, and four children, Sarah, Rebecca, Ephraim and John R. The woman keeping house over them was their stepmother. Nine years later, on 16 October 1879, Rebecca married Thomas Melvin McCollum a few miles away, and the two of them are buried at Woodstock.

He was a man the county trusted with other people's affairs. He was drawn onto the Cherokee Superior Court grand jury for the August term of 1880 and drawn again for 1883. In between, in 1880, he petitioned the ordinary to set apart a homestead exemption out of his own property for the use of his wife and children, which is what a man does when he is worried about creditors and not about much else.

In 1900 he is in District 890, seventy seven years old, with SARAH ELIZABETH BORING, born 10 April 1844, and their two young daughters, Missouri and Caroline, born in 1880 and 1883. She outlived him by twelve years and went into the same churchyard as the three wives before her.

He died on 9 August 1903, aged eighty one, and was buried at Atlanta. All four of the women he married lie together at Carmel Baptist Church Cemetery at Woodstock, in the county he had lived in since before he was twenty three, and he was carried thirty miles past them into the city.

If Ephraim Sargeant is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Ephraim Sargeant (1822-1903)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/ephraim-sargeant-1822-1903-d2a022.