Sarah “Sally” Barnard Moulton

Biography

Sarah “Sally” Barnard married into an established Moulton household. In 1821, at Weare in inland southern New Hampshire, she became the second wife of Joses Moulton, a man who already had a daughter from his marriage to Hannah Dudley. Sarah came from the Barnard family associated with Weare; the family and memorial records name her parents as Tristram Barnard and Sarah Titcomb.

Sarah and Joses made their home in the Gilmanton–Gilford area in the Lakes Region of central New Hampshire. Their children included Mary, Eliza and Julia Ann. The census abstracts place Sarah beside Joses in 1850, when he was a farmer, and again in 1860, when he was described as a butcher. Mary and another daughter, Sarah, were then still in the household.

Family losses punctuated Sarah's long life. Eliza died in October 1845, not quite eleven. Joses died in August 1867, leaving Sarah a widow for the next two decades. Mary died in September 1887, only a few months before Sarah herself died on February 7, 1888.

The family monument in Laconia joins these lives in one inscription. It gives Sarah's birth as January 5, 1796 and commemorates her alongside her husband and the two daughters whose deaths she survived.

The earlier family chronology gives 1794 as Sarah’s birth year, differing from the monument’s 1796. A Yale obituary record identifies her and Joses as the parents of Julia Ann Moulton Doane and associates the family with Gilmanton.