Sunday, March 8, 2009

Sartor Branches Website

This month I created www.sartor-family.info as a central storage place for Sartor family documents and research. I also created a Facebook group to reach out to modern Sartor descendants. I'm calling all Sartor descendants who may have documentation pertaining to their origins. It's a huge ongoing project, but it's a start. This way the various descendants of the Sartor family have a dedicated repository and handy solution for "send me everything you've got." Which is a lot. I estimate that I alone have collected approximately 500 documents pertaining to the various branches of the Sartor family.

So far, I have identified ten branches of the Sartor family who will be documented forward in time from the Revolutionary War, when John Peter Sartor and his sons John Peter Sartor Jr. and William Sartor lived in Union District, South Carolina. This much I have proven. Central to the project is the question of the Sartor family's colonial origins before the Revolutionary War. This I am still researching.

In The Sartor Search, Juanita Sample Taylor publishes a tantalizing letter which was attributed to William Sartor, son of John Peter Sartor Sr. In this letter he states that the Sartor family came to Roanoke from Wales in 1687 and provides additional family clues. I dearly, dearly wish to know where this letter came from and where it is now.

Ms. Taylor indicates that the Sartor family came to South Carolina from Fairfax County, Virginia. Unfortunately, she lived in a time when citing sources was cumbersome and unpopular. Therefore according to modern genealogical proof standards, I can't accept her conclusions without further evidence. While I was in Raleigh last year for the National Genealogical Conference, I visited the Fairfax County archives and copied documents which do show that a John Peter Sartor Sr. and John Peter Sartor Jr. lived there in the 1750's - 1770's. I am in the process of proving that this John Peter Sartor I and John Peter Sartor II. I believe that it is John Peter Sartor II who was John Peter Sartor Sr. of Union District, South Carolina, but belief is not enough to satisfy scholarly research standards.

If you have any information pertaining to the Sartor family's colonial origins please contact me. I am also interested in original documentation of the various Sartor family branches including those former slaves of the Sartor family who adopted their surname following the Civil War.

Hopefully if we all pool our documents, the true story will emerge.

1 comment:

AnnBreslauer said...

would love to have the call on the John Peter Sartor list...who is the 1st etc.
have just returned from a trip to MS with my elderly mother and visited some old Sartor cemeteries...one was unmarked in the woods. Wanting to offer a photo journal of the info gathered but need to have some John Peter facts. {took photos of the graves and have directions to the cemeteries}

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