Ancestors

Sarah Evans

Sarah, wife of David Evans, was born in Georgia about 1803. By the 1880 census both of her parents were born in Georgia too. Her earliest appearance is the 1830 census of Fayette County, Georgia, as the woman aged twenty to thirty in her husband's household of five. Two boys and a girl under five were with them. Neither boy appears in any later record.

Fayette County had been Creek land until the First Treaty of Indian Springs in January 1821, and the county was laid out that December. Her husband worked there as a cooper. In 1850 the family lived at dwelling 813 in the twenty ninth district. She was forty seven, with six children at home: Jane M., David, Edith, Mary, Sarah and Margaret. Every one of them was born in Georgia.

Between January 1859 and the summer of 1860 the whole household left Georgia. The census of 9 July 1860 finds them at dwelling 635 in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, post office Alexandria. The marshal put her at fifty one. Her daughter Edith Sophronia married Harrison Benson Nash in the parish about 1868.

The family then moved east into Neshoba County, Mississippi. She was sixty in the 1870 census there, with three unmarried daughters at home and her son David M. Evans in the next household. In June 1880, at sixty eight, she was living at Herbert in the same county with her husband and their two youngest daughters, Margaret and Fannie. No record of her death is known.

Her maiden name has never been found. No David Evans marriage of any date is in the Fayette County index. Two David Evans marriages of 1824 are indexed elsewhere in Georgia. The one in Wilkes County, to a Sarah Weaver, very probably belongs to a different couple, David T. Evans and Sarah Weaver Evans of Butts County. The other is neither proved nor ruled out. A suggestion that she was a Smith rests only on a daughter's middle initial.

The record most likely to name her family is her son's death certificate. David M. Evans died at Bethsaida, Neshoba County, on Sunday 30 October 1921, and a Mississippi certificate of that year asks for the mother's maiden name. A flush granite marker in the Bethsaida churchyard reads SARAH KILLENS EVANS. It is not hers. It belongs to her son's first wife.

If Sarah Evans is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Sarah Evans (b. 1803)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/sarah-evans-1803-09bea3.