Margret Sarah Ann Bates
Margret Sarah Ann Bates was born on 19 March 1841 in Cherokee County, Georgia. On 2 October 1856, at fifteen, she married Samuel James Ware Standridge, eighteen, at Mount Ida in Montgomery County, Arkansas, in the Ouachita Mountains. The county clerk entered her as Sarah Ann M. Bates. The wedding took place in Arkansas, so she had probably come west from Georgia with her own family, as he had with his. She bore twelve children at Mount Ida between 1857 and 1878: Cicero, Sarah Ann, James William Ware, Samuel, Eliza, Verlinda, Amanda, Stephen, Mary Anne, Henry and Margaret Rebecca among them. Her husband went to the war in 1862 and came back from Chattanooga in Union blue. He died in November 1877, when she was 36 and carrying her last child, and she raised the family alone on the mountain for another forty years. Her son Samuel died at nineteen in 1881 and Henry at 29 in 1904.
She died on 16 January 1918, aged 76, and is buried in Stanley-Standridge Cemetery under a stone that reads Mother, Grand Mother, Margret S. Standridge, in loving memory. A photograph her descendants keep shows an old woman in a checked head shawl, seated, with a plain face and steady eyes.
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Cite: Heirology, "Margret Sarah Ann Bates (1841-1918)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/margret-sarah-ann-bates-1841-1918-bc4e52.