Ancestors

Sarah Gillean

Sarah E. Gillean was born in Alabama about 1838. Both censuses that ask her birthplace, in 1860 and 1870, say Alabama. By 1860 she was in Jefferson County, Illinois, married to Walter Elias Loman, who was born in Kentucky on 15 April 1834. She is in the McClellan Township household of 1880 with him and nine children, all of them born in Illinois. The neighbours up and down that census page came from Kentucky and Illinois. She is the only person in that house whose own beginnings point somewhere else.

Her surname survives nowhere but on her children's marriage licences, and the three that name her spell it three ways. Oscar's, in 1874, gives Sarah E. Gillean and supplies the middle initial that appears nowhere else. Cora's gives S. Gillen. John Washington's is indexed Sarah Gilbus. She never signed anything that survives, so every version is a clerk's hearing of her name. Two of the three are the same name with a different final syllable and the third is a misreading of the same hand, so Gillean is the likeliest form of her name.

Her family in Alabama is not known, and neither is how she came to be married in southern Illinois.

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

Cite: Heirology, "Sarah Gillean (b. 1838)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/sarah-gillean-1838-190528.