mysterious ancestors

okay, danielle may mock me for my version of "family history," but i'm excited to have discovered an answer to a long standing question about my heritage. granted, i just did some googling and came up with it, but i have no reason to doubt its authenticity.

when i was a child and filling in my pedigree charts on sunday afternoons (yes, this was one of the approved sabbath activities in my home) i was excited by my relation to a sarah ward. although i wasn't named for her, i liked to believe i was. the cool thing about her is that she had one son, james, that took her last name. the other cool thing was that from all i could tell she had had two different husbands, william spanswick and a william spackman. i always wondered if it was the same guy - their names being so similar - but why didn't james have one of those last names? why did he go with ward? my father always said i should ask my uncle platt, i guess he was the record keeper of the family - my grandfather was the youngest of nine in his family and i'm guessing platt was the oldest boy at least. anyway, i do remember visiting platt in a nursing home once, but my family was never that big on bonding with the extended family so i never did ask uncle platt about good old sarah and her son james.

since i've been doing some scrapbooking lately i got online and googled "sarah ward" with utah. mostly i was looking to see if you could come up with anything about me online - nope. but i did discover this great ancestor of mine. let's see... she would be my father's father's father's father's mother. so is that my great great great grandmother? i found this story about her that said she was married to william spackman, to whom she was later sealed in the logan temple, but she already had a son named james spanswick whose father died when he was two. i'm guessing james later just kept his mother's maiden name - unfortunately the site didn't tell me why. but at least i figured out the order of the men and how james fits into it. spanswick is basically forgotten since the sealed line is with spackman. man, those sealings can be confusing. another cool thing i discovered about sarah is that her second husband (he's the only one i found real info on) was nine years her junior! i always thought it was cool that my grandmother was six years older than grandfather - but i guess that wasn't so abnormal afterall.

i love the internet.