Person:Sarah Mays (3)

Identity of James Ewing's Wife

There appears to be a case of mistaken identity that originated with the Ewing Association:

Margaret Sargeant "appears" to be the same person as Sarah Mays:

Margaret "Sarah" Ewing (formerly Sargeant)

Wife of James Ewing —

Mother of Nancy Ann (Ewing) Glendenin

Jeanet Ann (Ewing) Rodgers

John Ewing

Elizabeth (Ewing) Daughtery

Susan Jane Jean (Ewing) Moore

William Swago Ewing Sr

"In the very early days of gathering Ewing family history, Gilbert gave her the name Margaret SERGEANT, and A.E. is responsible for spreading that name widely in his early writings. But in later correspondence he retracted it and on all his copies of printed matter or carbons of those early letters he had penciled in, "not so". Gilbert was never quite sure where he'd gotten the name from, and when it later turned out that a John EWING in Pennsylvania had married a Hannah SERGEANT, Gilbert allowed as how maybe he'd confused the two. No marriage record for James Ewing has ever been found.

• Margaret SARGEANT may be Sarah MAYES" - there is extensive commentary to follow and I wanted to get the notes documented before they are lost to time:

"Recently, I received a copy of a 1939 letter from A. E. Ewing to R. O. McNiel and I think that the confession made by A. E. Ewing should be published. For those that are descendants of James Ewing, I hope the information in the following letter will be of some benefit to you. The emphases has been added. It is really important to get bad information corrected. A portion of the letter follows":

Grand Rapids, Mich. Sept. 14, 1939

R.O. McNiel Roanoke, VA

“NO, we have never found (to my later satisfaction, at least) who the Irish girl was who became the wife of James Ewing, the father of Swago Bill. Years ago, when I was still a greenhorn in the family history business, Dr. Gilbert A. Ewing of Jackson announced that the Irish girl’s name was Margaret Sargent. I accepted the statement, and had it so published in the Ewing sketch in Prince’s history. The doctor also announced that our James Ewing was a captain in the Revolution and received a grant of lands for his services. We went so far as to obtain from Richmond a copy of the grant (which I still have buried away somewhere in the attic) and it ran to James Ewing and a McNutt (James I think). The land described was on Indian Creek in Greenbrier County.

“Years after we had swallowed the error I came to know that Indian Creek is in present Monroe County, West Virginia (formerly Greenbrier) and that there was a family of Ewings and a family of McNutts living there. The Ewing family was, however, no relation of ours. There is a good 40 or 50 miles between the Swago and Indian Creeks, and we have not even a tradition that any of our Ewings ever lived on Indian. Moreover, the James Ewing of Indian Creek is accounted for as from the Staunton County, or farther east. So. ‘Captain James Ewing’ was eliminated from our records. There was another James Ewing from Prince Edward County. It is possible that some other James Ewing than ours married Margaret Sargent. I have never been able to find the name Sargent on any Virginia list. My grandfather did not know her name. Time and again I directed our conversation toward his grandfather James. When was he born----whom did he marry----where was he born----when did he come to Virginia----whom did he marry----was he in the Revolution----when and where did he die----the sum total of his answers was, “He come to Virginny in an arly day, a young man from the north of Ireland and soon after married an Irish girl.’

“Grandfather could have loaded me up with a great story had he been a ‘romancer.’ He would not go an inch beyond what he knew or believed to be true. James died as we know now five years before Grandfather was born (Enoch was born in 1799). Necessarily, all grandfather knew about him was what he had learned from family talk. He knew his Uncle John (Indian John) personally, as both John and William settled on the Little Raccoon in Gallia County, Ohio, only a few miles apart. Indian John Ewing was renowned for his prodigious memory, and it is very likely that grandfather learned much from his uncle, especially the story of the Clendennin Massacre in 1763. Grandfather had the names of his uncle and aunts at his tongue’s end, and also knew whom they married. He knew the birth dates of his own father and mother and mentioned that his father was double the age of Mary McNeill when he married her. Records I have since found verify his statements to the dot. He did not pretend to know much about the movements of the Ewings up to the time they appeared on Swago.”

A. E. Ewing