Ancestors

John Sargent

John Sargent was born on 14 September 1793, probably at Six Mile in the South Carolina upcountry, in what became Pickens District. He was a carpenter. He moved his family into Georgia, sat as a justice of a new county's court, and drowned in the Etowah River at Canton in 1834, when he was forty.

Most of what is known about him comes from one book. Edwin Everett Sargent's Sargent Record, a genealogy of the whole family printed in 1899, gives him this entry: "John [7] (Ephraim 6, etc.) b. Six Mile? S. C., Sept. 14, 1793, m. abt. 1819, Elizabeth Tate, b. July 24, 1800, and both d. 1834, at Canton, Ga., and bur. there. He was a carp., held office and res. S. C. and Ga.; c. b. at S. C.?" The bracketed numbers count generations, and "carp." is carpenter.

The book was compiled while his son Ephraim was still alive, and it gives that son's four marriages and the birth dates of his children. Where those can be checked against the Cherokee County marriage book and the gravestones at Woodstock, they agree. That is the reason to take its word for John, though no record of his own lifetime has been found that names him as Ephraim's father.

He married Elizabeth Tate about 1819. She was born on 24 July 1800 and was about nineteen. The book gives them seven children: William C., born 19 June 1820; Ephraim B., 10 June 1822; Benjamin Tate, 30 March 1824; Peter K., 18 November 1825; Polly A., 14 September 1827; Seabron Humphrey, 21 May 1829; and John C., 1 November 1833. The compiler thought they were born in South Carolina, and put a question mark against it.

By 1834 the family was at Canton, the seat of Cherokee County, Georgia. The county had been laid out only a few years earlier on land taken from the Cherokee Nation. John was one of the Justices of the Inferior Court. That court was a bench of several justices who ran the county's business, and it also sat as the court of ordinary for wills, estates and orphans.

On 5 June 1834 the Georgia Telegraph at Macon reprinted a paragraph from the Cass Gazette: "Distressing Casualty. On Sunday last, Mr. Sergant was drowned in the Etawah river, in the vicinity of the court-house. Himself and his son, a lad of 10 or 12 years of age, were crossing the river in a flat, and his son accidentally fell out. Mr. Sergant leaped into the river to save his child, and was drowned. The body was saved by the exertions of a third person. Mr. Sergant was a respectable member of society, and was one of the Justices of the Inferior Court of Cherokee county."

The notice gives no first name. The Sargent Record does not say how he died. But the book has him holding office and dying at Canton in 1834, and the newspaper has a Mr. Sergant, a justice of the Cherokee County court, drowning beside the Canton court-house that year. They are very probably the same man.

The boy in the flat was ten or twelve. William was nearly fourteen that spring and Ephraim was eleven, so Ephraim fits the paper best. The notice does not say whether the boy came out of the river alive. A body "saved by the exertions of a third person" is the father's.

Elizabeth died the same year. The book says both were buried at Canton. No stone for either is known. They left seven children, the eldest not yet fifteen and the youngest about seven months old. Neither William nor Ephraim is found in a parent's household in any census.

The children stayed in that country. William Cannon Sargent became a captain of the 7th Georgia Militia and is buried at Carmel Baptist Church at Woodstock. Ephraim farmed seven hundred acres in Cherokee County and lies in the same churchyard. Benjamin Tate married Elizabeth Camp and, by the book, died at Vicksburg in 1864 during the war. Seabron Humphrey married Cynthia Hinton, served in the 43rd Georgia, and farmed at Hickory Flat.

The book also names his parents, Ephraim Sargent and Mary Dore or Dove, who married in Albemarle County, Virginia about 1783 and settled at Six Mile. That family is real. On 24 July 1850 the census found Ephraim, aged ninety, at Six Mile in the house of his youngest son, Abraham Benson Sargent, with a wife of eighty five. He outlived John by nineteen years and died there on 1 May 1853.

The book goes further and makes Ephraim the boy born at Amesbury, Massachusetts in May 1757 who marched with the Amesbury minute-men on the alarm of 19 April 1775. The rolls prove the Amesbury man's service. Nothing joins him to Six Mile except the compiler, and the 1850 census gives the old man's birthplace as North Carolina. So the Revolutionary soldier stays a possibility, set out in full below.

If John Sargent is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "John Sargent (1793-1834)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-sargent-1793-1834-81a55f.