Sons of Sara

I'm starting to think all this time I just wasn't trying hard enough. Lately I've been having a great deal of luck in identifying photos that I had long ago dismissed as "Unknowns" or "Names I'll never figure out." They've been on boxes for years and every time I dig through the archives I see them again and think "I'll never figure out who these people are" and put them back.

 But not today!

Today's triumph is a photo of two young men - boys, really. On the back in old, faded pencil is written "Sara Burdett Boys, Washington".

I have had no idea who Sara Burdett was.

This used to stop me from scanning and archiving photos, but not anymore. As I cataloged the "unknown" photos I decided to try and find the Sara Burdett and figure out just how we were related. I knew members of the Jackson family were on the west coast, so I thought maybe a connection existed there. I searched simply "Sara Burdett" and "Washington, USA" in Ancestry and came up with sparse results. I started going after one Sara who was born in Canada, but I quickly went down the rabbit hole and found myself looking at English families in the 1700s. Not my Sara.

 So I cleared the search and tried again. This time I found a Sara O. Burdett living in Washington in 1910. She was widowed at the time, so I had to do a few more searches to find her son, Thomas, and find him in an earlier Census with Sarah O. Burdett and her husband, Eli. Eli and Sara had two sons, Eli and Charles.

Two sons - two boys in the picture. We're getting closer.

Next, was Sarah's maiden name. If this was my Sara Burdett she had to be related, right? She wasn't just going to be some random friend on the coast. Women are notoriously hard to find through the Census because of name changes - especially when the maiden name is unknown. I decided to search for Eli. I saw he was born in Iowa, so I felt there was promise. Census records went back to 1856 for Eli, and I found him in 1860 and 1870. It was in 1880, however, while he was living in Nebraska, that I found my answer. There, at the end of the list of household members, was Sara Burdett.

Or, rather, Sarah Sabin.

Ancestry makes related searches pretty simply, so when I clicked on Sarah Sabin the "related records" column quickly brought me back to 1870 when Sarah was living in Howard Township, Tama County, Iowa, with her father, William Jerome Sabin, also known as my great-great-great-great uncle.

Sarah (Sabin) Burdett is my first cousin four times removed. She and my great-great grandmother, Delila Pearl (Sabin) Reinig, were first cousins. That's why her photos was among Pearl's items and why a woman on the west coast would send photos of her boys back to Iowa.

Another mystery solved. Only a thousand more to go...