Searching for Sarah Jones

October 2023

I’m making turkey pie.

When the kids were small, I loved making turkey pie. It was just a matter of throwing all the turkey dinner leftovers into a pot with a can of cream of chicken soup, add some poultry seasoning, pour it into a frozen pie shell and chuck it in the over. Half an hour later – I am a Queen!

“Mom made turkey pie!” the kids would exclaim happily, like I’d just invented magic.

There would just be enough to feed us all. Everyone fought to get seconds, but as the kids grew older, taller and hungrier, there were none. So, I started adding turkey tartlets to the menu - the youngest one popping them in his mouth whole as he ran off to basketball practice.

As I prep to make the pie for just the two of us today, my mind wanders to Sarah Jones.

How did she keep her recipes as her family fled their home during the Revolution? Were they in her memory, learned from her mother and grandmother?

So little is known about her – when was she born? When did she die? Were her eyes the same blue as my husbands? Her hair the same chestnut brown as my own children?

What I have discovered about her in the past few years is scant.

Searching for Loyalists comes with complications: they lost the war. Families who fought on winning side omitted their Loyalist relatives in written histories, obscuring the past. In other cases, women were identified through their relationships to the men in their lives, so tracking down their birth names can be convoluted. Then there is the tradition of naming children after their father, mother and grandparents.

My Sarah Jones, wife of Jonathan Jones, is the daughter-in-law of Sarah Jones. She also has a daughter named Sarah Jones and a son named Jonathan. So even when her name is found deep in some document, it is time-consuming to untangle the puzzle of who is who.

For a long time, I didn’t even know her birth name. Then, one day I found a Jonathan & Sarah together, in a typewritten listing of book-bound marriage records transcribed more than a century ago.

Among the 88 different listings for marriages under the name Jones I discover Sarah’s birth name and their wedding date. It’s not a lot, but it opened a door to Sampson family trees.

I searched for Sarah Sampson, Sarah Samson, Sara Samson and Cerah Sammon but none of these names connected with a Jonathan Jones. For years I followed Sampson leads to nowhere.

Then, a breakthrough. On an online ancestry site, a modern-day Jones connection posts a marriage licence on the Jones family tree. It is a hand-written time capsule from the 18^th century. It is fire-singed, a result of a devastating fire at the state capital in Albany in 1911. Many records were lost. But fortunately, not this one.

Because the discoloration near the edge obscures words at the margin, I don’t see her full name; I just read Lampson. Interesting. Have I been searching for the wrong Sarah? The document has other snippets of information - like witness names and their home communities (listed as Albany County) – that I add to my ever-growing list to research. But I am happy. Instead of a brick wall, I have found a door. Next search: Sarah Lampson.

Back in my kitchen in modern day Baddeck, I gather the ingredients for my turkey pie for two. How different was Sarah Jones cooking experience to mine I wonder - as I twist the spigot on the tap to access an endless supply of cold or hot water and rinse out the soup can before tossing it in the blue plastic recycling bin. Then turn, in my ergonomic kitchen, to the fridge and fetch a carrot from a plastic bag, stamped with the grocery store’s logo, grab my vegetable peeler from the drawer and begin.

NOTES

·        The first cookbook published in the US was published in 1796 – more than a decade after Sarah & Jonathan Jones left the country. The American Cookery was the first to reflect the New England colonist methods of cooking in the new world. British recipes, carried across the seas by the earliest settlers, used British ingredients, many of which were not grown or available in North America. The Cookery (a Dutch word) included information on preparing beef, veal, pork and turkey, which is native to North America.

·        The Public Archives of Nova Scotia has an interesting article about eating & early foods in Nova Scotia. The link can be found here: https://archives.novascotia.ca/cooking/history/ . The University of New Brunswick has an interesting compilation of recipes, medicines and planting advice from the 18^th century found here: https://emmr.lib.unb.ca/sources .