Sarah Frances Staten (1846-1885), young mother in West Virginia - Two's paternal grandmother

 

Sarah Frances Staten (Sept 20, 1846 - Sept 22, 1885) 

This is Two's (Una Fisher) paternal grandmother. 

According to Two, Sarah was one in a family of 13 girls and 2 boys.  None of the girls were over five feet tall.  Sarah reportedly was a beautiful woman with coal black hair and blue eyes.  

  

Sarah Frances was born in Buckingham County, Virginia, the eldest daughter of a large farming family.  I have not been able to find out whether the family were slave owners.

pre-Civil War map of Virginia.  West Virginia became a Union state in 1863. 

Buckingham County VA: 

We do know that sometime during the Civil War, the Staten family moved west about 280 miles, into the free part of Virginia (which becomes West Virginia in 1863), settling in Hannan district, Mason County, near the Ohio border.  

2021 map 

Soon Sarah Frances met George Washington Fisher, who had also relocated from Virginia to West Virginia, and they married on April 28, 1867.   They were both twenty years old, and they settled next door to Sarah Frances' family in Hannan district, in southern Mason County, as they began to farm, and raise a large family of their own.  By the time Two's father, John Jackson Fisher, was born, the family had moved a bit south to Grant, in the center of
Cabell County. 

Cabell County, 1873 

"Sarah Frances was pregnant with her 11th child when she died.  She went out to help round up the newly shorn sheep (the men folk were in the field), got chilled, developed pneumonia and died."  She was just 39 years old.  John Jackson was ten years old.  

All of Sarah's 10 children grew to adulthood...  "a remarkable thing in that day." *

Sources:

- *interview with Una Fisher Brown (Two), 1976.   Sarah Frances was Two's paternal grandmother.  

1870 federal census 

Find a Grave index for Sarah Frances Fisher 

Cynthia Poth Nanto family tree on Ancestry dot com