Sarah McKee

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sarah McKee (1799–1888), a 4× great-grandmother of the compiler in the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her birth in western Pennsylvania, her parentage, her recorded daughter, her death in Utah Territory, and the era context of her long westward life. Notable: Scots-Irish surname McKee; remarkable migration arc from Pennsylvania to Box Elder County, Utah.

Sarah McKee (1799–1888) was born on the 22nd of September, 1799, in Mt Pleasant, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Joseph McKee (1753–1851) and Jane Young (1775–1856). She entered the world in the closing months of the eighteenth century, in a region of western Pennsylvania then populated heavily by Scots-Irish settlers — a community whose surname patterns, including the name McKee, attest to its Ulster origins and to the steady westward push of such families through the Appalachian frontier in the decades following the Revolution.

Sarah's life spanned nearly nine decades and an extraordinary breadth of American geography. Among her children recorded in this archive is Margaret Ann Davis (1835–1882), through whom the present line of descent continues. The mid-century years in which Margaret was raised were ones of profound mobility for American families, as overland routes opened westward and religious and economic movements drew settlers far beyond the Allegheny country of Sarah's birth.

The trajectory of Sarah's own life bears witness to that great migration. Having been born in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, she died on the 20th of February, 1888, in Brigham City, Box Elder County, Utah — a settlement founded in the 1850s in the northern reaches of the Utah Territory. Brigham City in Sarah's later years was a community shaped by irrigation agriculture and by the cooperative settlement patterns characteristic of the Great Basin in the latter half of the nineteenth century. To have begun life in the Pennsylvania of John Adams's presidency and to have closed it in the Utah of the late territorial period was to have lived through nearly the whole arc of the American republic's first century.

Her parents, Joseph and Jane, each lived into great age — Joseph to 1851 and Jane to 1856 — so that Sarah was already in her fifties before she was orphaned. Sarah McKee was the compiler's 4× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.