Finding Sarah

When you start a journey that takes over 5 years, you know there is going to be some twists and turns and even some bumps.  This is the journey that my husband Keith and I took to find out about his family.  It all started when we were doing his family tree, since his aunts and his mother had some great stories of growing up in rural Appalachia, along the Tug River that separates Kentucky and West Virginia.  The stories they told just sounded too wild to be totally true.  What we have found out in the process is it was only the tip of the iceberg!  The stories were very true but not the whole story.  This is our journey into the wilds of a land that most would not be able to survive on.  A story of love, greed, and the most famous of American feuds the Hatfield’s and McCoy’s.

With this blog I will try to recreate the life of Sarah Belle Mounts.  My husband’s great grandmother on his mothers, mother’s side.  She only lived a few short decades but in that time she was married 4 times had 7 children by three of those husbands.  She was the product of an out of wedlock relationship, as were all of her brothers and sisters.  

When we first started doing the family tree we hit a dead end with Sarah, but I also had her as Sarah Johnson.  She was not a Johnson but it is rumored some of her siblings were from a married man named Peyton Johnson.  Sarah’s mother Elizabeth supposedly was helping take care of Mr. and Mrs. Peyton Johnsons children and had a couple of children by him but we do not know for sure.  Mrs. Johnson was Elizabeth’s cousin.   Only a dna test can unravel that mystery.

What we do know is from a dna test that was done on one of Sarah’s descendants is that she is not a Johnson.  Keep reading to find out who is her father.  When we found out we (the family) were shocked and but also had a feeling it might be who it turned out to be. For several generations there was the rumor in parts of the family.  Other parts of the family were completely shocked.  In those days you didn’t talk about being an out of wedlock child.  It happened quite frequently, especially in rural Appalachia.