My Family Tree

Sarah Carr Dixon married Boyd Livingston, of Lot 31, in 1886 and was identified as the wife of Boyd on the estate papers for her mother's estate, dated 1887. Some family historians assumed that Sarah must have died before 1891, because she did not appear in that or subsequent census records with her husband, who later remarried. And in fact, that was usually the case when a wife or husband disappeared.

However, it seems that Sarah ran away to Massachusetts, perhaps with the much younger Daniel Gass. She asked the courts to annul her marriage in 1895. She claimed that she had been forced into marriage by her parents, and that she and Boyd had never lived together as man and wife. Boyd, she said, was more like a brother to her because they had been raised together. She was granted an annulment.

On the 1930 US census form, Sarah said she was age 25 at the time of her first marriage (1883?), and Daniel Gass said he was 17 (1886). In the 1900 and 1910 US census forms, they said they had been married since 1886. Their daughter Hazel was born on the Island in 1886, and subsequent children in Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts marriage record for Sarah and Daniel was dated 1896.

Sarah provided a home, according to US census records, for at least two of the daughters of Mary Jane Dyment and James Gass, which is how I discovered her story.