Farewell, Sarah!

I found it! Great-Grandma Sarah died on 29 November 1943 at age 71. Just five years before I was born. I'm sure she was glad to get home. I also discovered that her father, Isaac Stiers Doron, was a Civil War invalid, and also that he might have been Jewish! “Doron” means “gift from God” in Hebrew, and Isaac’s father’s name was Gabriel David. Gabriel was born in Pennsylvania in 1813, and more than that we do not know. Except some of Philadelphia’s earliest settlers, arriving before 1800, were Dutch Sephardic Jews. Isaac with a father named Gabriel and a daughter named Sarah. It’s looking good here for a Jewish ancestor! Sarah Frances Doron DeWitt—Mormon Jewish Huguenot Witch. Wow. And, alas, decisively deceased.

But before I move on to other topics (this is not after all meant to be a genealogical blog), the name of the day belongs to Sarah’s ancestor Exercise (too bad it's not Exorcize) Conant, born on Christmas Eve 1637 in Salem (!), Mass. Runner-up is Sluman Everett, one of the brothers of Lucy, Mehitable, and Eliphalet, whom I mentioned last time.

One thing I can’t help but notice over and over again as I peruse the pedigrees is that most obvious difference between our time and times past: People used to have more children, and lose more children. Everybody knows this. We all have many ancestors with 8, 9, 10, 12 … I found one with 15 children, 7 of whom died before age 5. So all the while having a child every two years for 30 years, this woman lost more children than I have! And still raised more than I have. Boggles the mind. I don’t do well with loss. I’m also claustrophobic and bad with extremes in temperature. I’ve seen those tiny cabins at Winter Quarters in Nebraska. About the size of those plastic things my grandchildren play in. I’ve seen the not-quite-snug house where my mother’s great-grandparents lived in Pleasant Grove with 13 children. It’s about the size of our garage. Count your many blessings, name them one by one, is all I can say at this point. I know that we say that we have greater challenges now, what with media corruption and drugs and creeping socialism and all the temptations the children face. But I just don’t think I could live in an unheated dirt-floor log cabin with thirteen children and no indoor plumbing before the invention of, uh, hygiene …. I was saved for the latter days, all right. Because I am a wimp!