♀Sarah Williams

Sarah Williams (12 December 1816 – 26 August 1885) was an Irish-born settler of Friendsville, Wabash County, Illinois, brought to New Jersey as a small child, and the wife of the merchant and county judge William Robert Wilkinson. She was the great-great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Robert Thomas Wilkinson (1850–1917), his daughter Mabel Wilkinson (1875–1954) and her daughter Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968).

Early life

She was born in Ireland on 12 December 1816, the daughter of George Williams (1784–1861). Her obituary records that her father “came from Ireland and settled in New Brunswick, N. J., when this daughter was but two years old”; a county history published in 1883 puts her age at the crossing at one year and says she was reared in New Brunswick. The census of 1850 bears out the route, showing a brother born in New Jersey about 1824 in her father’s household. George Williams moved the family to Wabash County, Illinois, in 1830, and in 1850 he was farming there on land of his own.

Marriage and family

On 9 December 1841, at Friendsville, she married William Robert Wilkinson (1816–1886), an English-born merchant of the town who became a justice of the peace, a notary public and, in 1857, county judge of Wabash County; her obituary calls her the wife of “Judge William R. Wilkinson”. The 1883 county history records that the couple had eight children, five of whom were then living: Alice A., the wife of W. H. Besley; Mary, the wife of John H. Allison; Robert T.; Sarah, the wife of Thomas H. Penn; and George. A daughter, Jane, known as Jennie, died in 1882; the other two are not named.

The family lived at Friendsville for the rest of her life. In 1850 the census listed her in the Wabash Election Precinct, Wabash County, Illinois, as Sarah Wilkinson, born in Ireland, in the household of her husband, William Robert Wilkinson, then a merchant, with their three eldest children. In 1860 the household was one of substance, with real and personal estate each valued at $20,000, and it included her father, then 74, who died the following year. She was keeping house there in 1870, and in 1880 she was still at Friendsville with her husband and three of the younger children.

Death

She died at the family residence in Friendsville on Wednesday, 26 August 1885, “in the 69th year of her age”, after three years as an invalid, during which one of her daughters nursed her. She was buried in Friendsville from the church where, her obituary says, she had so long worshipped. Her husband died the following year.

Notes

A family chart compiled in 1994 gave her death as 1858 at Friendsville; the censuses of 1860, 1870 and 1880 show her living, and the date appears to have been borrowed from her mother-in-law, Ann Wilkinson, who died at Friendsville about that time. A newspaper obituary index gives 2 August 1885, but the obituary itself names Wednesday, 26 August, and 26 August 1885 fell on a Wednesday. An account circulated as an excerpt from her husband’s obituary gives the marriage as 8 December 1841; its wording is that of the 1883 county history, which gives the 9th. Her mother’s name is not settled: the parents linked on Sarah’s own Find a Grave memorial name her Margaret, and another compiled tree calls her Ann; no record has been found for either. No wife appears in George Williams’s household in 1850 or 1860, and she had probably died before the 1850 census.