Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music):
1) I have many females in my family tree database without a last name. One of those female first names is "Sarah." Do you have situations like this, where you don't know the surname of some females? [I call them LNU persons - Last Name Unknown.]
2) How many "Sarah" persons without a surname do you have in your genealogy database? How many of them are your ancestor?
3) If you have one that is your ancestor, have you looked recently to determine if there are more records online that might lead you to her surname? Go look for one - you might be surprised!
4) Tell us about your Sarah LNU ancestors with no surname. Perhaps someone will read it and help you out!
5) Share your information in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or on Facebook or Google+.
6) NOTE: If you don't have any "Sarah" persons without a surname, then pick another female first name.
I have the following "Sarah" persons with no surname in my genealogy database (over 43,000 persons):
* 77 that have just the first name "Sarah."
* Of those, 14 are my ancestors. All of them were born before 1700.
Here are three that might be solvable with a little help:
1) Sarah LNU (1605-1650), who married William Worcester (1595-1662) in about 1628 in Buckinghamshire (?), England. They migrated to Salisbury, Massachusetts and had 13 children.
2) Sarah LNU (1611-16781), who married (1) Robert Keyes (1604-1647) in about 1630, immigrated to Watertown, Massachusetts and had 8 children; married (2) John Gage (1606-1672) in 1658 in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and resided in Newbury, Massachusetts.
3) Sarah LNU (1644-1693), who married Thomas Horton (1638-1716) in about 1668, resided in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and had 6 children.
For these three Sarah LNUs, I looked on Ancestry Member Trees using the spouse's name, and did not find any real help. There are too many entries and they are not ordered in any rational way.
I also looked on the FamilySearch Family Tree and found:
* Sarah (LNU) Worcester (1600-1650), wife of William Worcester (1595-1662) of Salisbury, is listed as Sarah Brown, with parents Samuel Brown and Susanna Bates. This is a possibility, I need to investigate it further. There are other entries in FSFT for this William Worcester, and several say the wife is Sarah Brown, and several others say Sarah Blake.
* Sarah LNU (1611-1681), who married (1) Robert Keyes (1604-1647), of Watertown and Newbury - there is one entry with her surnamel isted as Allen, but without any sources or parents listed.
* Sarah (LNU) Horton (1644-1693), wife of Thomas Horton (1638-1716) has no strong matches with a surname.
So my little foray into online trees was not too productive. I will follow up on the wife of William Worcester. I really need an authoritative NEHGR article or surname book entry that sources an English parish register or a father's will or land deed to provide some evidence besides a family tree entry.
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Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver