Sarah Turpin

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Sarah Turpin (1777–1854), a 5× great-grandparent of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line. This entry covers her Kentucky birth, early loss of both parents, marriage to Rev. Henry Lewis Darnall, her daughter Eliza, and her death in Hendricks County, Indiana. Notable: frontier Kentucky origins and a clerical marriage tying the family to early Indiana settlement.

Sarah Turpin (1777–1854) entered the world on the Kentucky frontier, born in 1777 in Clark County to William Turpin (1752–1789) and Nancy Ann Hanly (1743–1788). She belonged to the first generation of Anglo-American children born west of the Appalachians, in a region that had only recently been opened to permanent settlement and which would not formally become the Commonwealth of Kentucky until 1792. Clark County in those years was a country of stockaded stations, contested ground between settlers and Native nations, and bluegrass meadows newly broken to the plow.

Sarah's childhood was marked by early sorrow. Her mother Nancy died in 1788, when Sarah was about eleven, and her father William followed the next year, in 1789, leaving Sarah orphaned before she had reached her teens. The manner of her upbringing thereafter is not recorded in the family papers, though such orphaned children on the Kentucky frontier were typically absorbed into the households of older siblings or kin.

In adulthood Sarah was united in marriage to the Reverend Henry Lewis Darnall, a union that placed her within a clerical household at a time when frontier ministers occupied a position of unusual social weight. To Sarah and Henry was born a daughter, Elizabeth — known in the family as Eliza — in 1802. Through Eliza, who lived until 1876, the Turpin and Darnall lines were carried forward into the families documented in later pages of this register.

Sarah lived out her final years in Indiana, having joined the broad migration of Kentucky families northward across the Ohio in the decades following statehood. She died on the 19th of April, 1854, at Danville, in Hendricks County, Indiana, at the age of seventy-seven.

Sarah Turpin was a 5× great-grandmother of the compiler on the paternal-grandfather (PP) line.