Starting a new Year with Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, she asks us to talk about an ancestor we admire.
I'm going to choose my maternal great-great grandmother Sarah Ann (Sunderland) McKee Rogers (1842-1922).
Sarah was the daughter of Benjamin Sunderland (1813-1890) and Margaret Emeline Weller (1814-1810). She was born in Ohio and died in Allen County, Indiana. She married my great-great grandfather Nelson Reed McKee (1838-1908) 8 April 1859 in Allen County, Indiana. They had three children, Florence Elizabeth (1862-1943, my great-grandmother), Benjamin Franklin, called Frank, (1865-1890), and Charles Preston (born in 1873; death date not yet discovered).
As related in my blog post "The Mystery of Nelson Reed McKee" (https://karenaboutgenealogy.blogspot.com/2009/05/blacksheep-sunday-mystery-of-nelson.html), the family's life changed when Nelson disappeared on the night of 31 May 1879, never to be seen again in Indiana. The town turned out to search for him.
He turned up later in Beloit, Rock County, Wisconsin. In Indiana, he had been a jeweler and watch repairman. He took up the same occupation in Beloit, first under the name Nels R. McCuren, then later under his true name, Nelson R. McKee. He married Ida Josephine Colby 1 August 1880. There was a slight problem with that: he was still married to Sarah Ann.
Here's where her story begins, though not as richly documented as Nelson's. I see Sarah as holding out hope for a while that Nelson would return or be found. That hope must have eventually faded, and Sarah sought a divorce from Nelson, which was granted in mid-November of 1882. The divorce was uncontested, and Sarah was awarded custody of the children. She was left to raise her three children by herself. Her 16-year-old daughter, on the cusp of 17 years, went to work as a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse to help support herself and her mother and brothers. For the same reason, by the 1880 U.S. federal census, Frank, then 15, was earning a living as a wagon driver.
Sarah obtained the divorce to enable her to marry again, which she did 29 October 1884, to a man named Luke Rogers. She faced the grief and shock of her husband Nelson's disappearance, and later the knowledge that he had abandoned the family. She had to endure six years of being a single mother, and the strain of seeing two of her three children having to go to work at early ages to help support the family. One did what one must.
Luke Rogers died in 1915. I have not found out much about him. I hope he was a decent man who treated my great-great grandma and her children well. I hope they had a happy life together. Sarah deserved it.
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