Person:Margaret Unknown (1521)

Margaret was born in Pennsylvania about the year 1785. When she was in her early 20’s, she married James Sheehan, an Irish man some thirteen years her senior. She and James were probably married by 1808, because by the end of the year in 1810 they were the parents of two small children: a boy, David, and an infant daughter, Eleanor.

Some researches have speculated that her name before she married James Sheehan was Margaret Stansell, but this has not been substantiated and may well be based on an erroneous assumption that this Margaret and another Margaret Stansell were the same person. Margaret's surname at birth, and the names of her parents, are not yet known.

Wherever they had each lived in the years leading up to their marriage, Margaret and James, a farmer, were living in 1810 in Centre County, Pennsylvania, in Bald Eagle Township on Muncy Mountain.

Between 1810 and 1813, James and Margaret acquired some land in Halfmoon Township, in another part of Centre County. In November of 1813 James bought an adjacent tract of land, increasing the size of their property. Over the next few years he acquired more land that was contiguous to his, and eventually he and Margaret would own 192 acres in the Halfmoon Valley.

During their remaining years in that valley, the size of their family increased as well. Margaret would give birth to at least four more daughters – Margaret, Jane, Elizabeth and Kesiah – and another son, James. There are no records found of other children, though in the twenty years in which she gave birth to her seven known children, there might possibly have been other pregnancies as well.

Margaret was almost certainly a member of a Methodist Church in Centre County. In 1825, James was one of seven men who together bought a half acre of land in that valley on which to build a place of worship for members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and were the first trustees of that church.

In 1829, James and Margaret sold their land in the Half Moon Valley and moved on, taking with them their seven children, the oldest, David, then being about twenty one and the youngest, Kesiah, only a year old. James was then in his sixties, and Margaret was close to fifty. When she put her hand to the document that authorized the sale of their farm and land, she gave her consent with her mark. James, for his part, did so with his signature.

Margaret and James may have settled for a while in the northwest corner of Ohio. If they did actually live in either county, it was neither for long nor for good, for they were residing in Montgomery County by the autumn of 1833 at the very latest. In February of 1834 their daughter, Eleanor, married Isaac Stansell there.

The Sheehan family began the work of clearing their land in Washington Township for a farm and building a home. The land extended for one half of a mile along the west side of a toll pike road. A long road, then little more than a path, divided their land, running mostly north and south, though it curved sharply to the east at the north end to connect with the toll pike road. In time the toll pike road would be known as Main Steet in Centerville. In time the long road running north and south on which their farm lay and their home stood would come to be known as Sheehan Road.

Though they had belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church in Pennsylvania, in Ohio Margaret and James were Baptists. Perhaps this was a matter of convenience, with the Sugar Creek Baptist Church being not at all far from where the Sheehans lived.

Margaret’s husband lived only a few short years after the family’s move to Montgomery County. It may be that the work of clearing the land and establishing a farm took too heavy a toll on a man of his age. After his death, Margaret’s daughter, Eleanor, and her husband, Isaac Stansell, began buying (in 1839) half of the land that James had left to Eleanor’s brothers and sisters. The other half of the land left by James to his children in 1838 remained with James and Margaret’s youngest son, James. It was there that Margaret lived out her years.

In September of 1854, Margaret’s son, James, married Susan Jane Pine, a Quaker, whose family had a farm on Spring Valley Road, the old toll pike road, a little south of Centerville. In March of the following year, at the age of 70, Margaret Sheehan died, and was buried in the Sugar Creek Baptist Cemetery between her husband and her daughter, Jane, who had died five years earlier. James and Margaret’s daughters Eleanor, Elizabeth and Margaret, and possibly Kesiah, are buried at Sugar Creek, too, with their husbands and many of their children. James and Margaret’s son, younger son, James, and his wife, Susan, are also buried there, with a daughter, Sarah. Their older son, David, and his wife are buried in the Pretty Prairie Cemetery in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, with some of their children and grandchildren.

Margaret Sheehan is buried in the Sugar Creek Baptist Cemetery in the 9th row, position #17 beginning from the north end, with her daughter, Jane, beside her and her husband on her other side.