My grandmother met none of Mama Sarah‘s sisters, but she know of them. Loudie, of course, her own grandmother. And Ann Elizabeth, mother of Minnie and Daniel and Dollie Simmons. And Carrie. Who was a little more elusive because she had no children that my grandmother knew of.  She was only a name Sarah mentioned.

I managed to find a few references to her. The earliest is in the Records of the Congregational Church of Christ in Dudley, vol. II, in which Carrie Henderson appears in membership rolls for 1886 with sisters Suddie, Lutie and Sarah Henderson.  (“Suddie,” or Mary Susan Henderson, was not one of the great-aunts my grandmother knew.) Next to Carrie’s name are these notations: “Bowsman” and “absent.”

“Bowsman” was “Boseman,” actually, the surname of the man Carrie married a year later. Wayne County NC marriage records show that, on 25 June 1887, George Boseman, 24, “col’d,” and Carrie Henderson, 18, col’d, applied for a marriage license.  A.T. Dove, M.G. performed their ceremony on 29 June 1887, in Brogden, before Dortch Winn, Jno. Winn, and Frank Parker.  (They apparently were not wed in Carrie’s church, as Dove was not pastor there.)  The marriage was childless, and probably ended with George’s death.

On 21 Dec 1899, Carrie Boseman, 28, married Arch Grantham, 48, colored, in Brogden township. R.B. Johns, M.G. (of the Congregational Church) officiated and W.D. Grantham and Georgiana Winn witnessed.  The family appears in the 1900 census of Grantham township, Wayne County: farmer Arch Grantham, wife Carrie (29), and (his) children [illegible], Emma, Annie, Barfield A., and Lula A.  Carrie reported 0 of 0 children living.

This is where things stood until a couple of years ago, when I ran across B.B., a descendant of Archie Barfield Grantham (1851-1915) and his first wife, Mary Adeline Raynor (1855-1897). In 1906, Arch married his third wife, B.B. told me — so Carrie, still childless, died within five years or so of their wedding. It was nice to be able to round out the thread of her life in that way, but there was more. For many years, a portrait hung on his grandparents’ wall, a hand-tinted, charcoal-enhanced photograph of Archie … and Carrie.