Sarah B. Mulholland: Taking Care of Family

The spinster sister is a well known personage in past centuries, living with relatives and in most of the official documents, barely noted. In general, women were less visible and public, making tracing these unmarried siblings challenging for family histories. In the case of Sam Mulholland's family, a perfect examples is Sarah B. Mulholland, the only one of his six sisters who never married. Called "Aunt Sadie" by the Mulholland girls, Sarah was the caretaker daughter whose life seemed inevitably caught up in dealing with her birth family's needs, thus never having a family by marriage.

Sarah B. and sister Eliza Jane Mulholland

Sarah was the fourth of eleven children, born in 1849. Like others in her very big family, she lived at home until she was in her early teens, then moved away to work as a servant on a neighbor's farm as soon as she was old enough. But as most of her other sisters married and left home, she was the one who returned to keep house for her widowed father and two younger brothers by 1884.

With the death of her father in 1888, she appears as an heir in his will but essentially disappears from other official records. It seems likely she lived with one her brothers on the farms inherited from her father or worked in a local household as a servant, but she does not appear again in the records until years later. She sold farm land she owned in 1893. In the 1898 city directory, she is shown as a boarder in her brother Sam's household at the time they moved to north Ann Arbor. With several young children, she was likely a welcome household helper for sister-in-law Carrie Mulholland.

She did not live with the family when they moved to Chapin two years later, and probably chose to absent herself from the growing domestic disturbances that led Carrie to divorce Sam Mulholland. In 1906 Sarah is listed in rural Ann Arbor, and from about 1910 until her death at 75 in 1925, she lived at 200 Chapin, two doors down from the now-divorced Carrie and her children. 

Little is known of her life despite the fact that she lived so near Carrie and family for many years. Mae Mulholland said she remembers her living there but nothing more about her. She may have been reclusive in her later years, perhaps suffering from the anxiety disorder that appears to run in this family.

Sarah died at the age of 77 of senility and a broken hip, staying in her final weeks with her younger sister Ada Mulholland Winney in Superior Township. She was buried in the Oak Grove Cemetery in Dixboro near her parents and many of her siblings. 

Even in death there is some confusion in her records, with one set of dates carved on the main tombstone with her parents, and a different set of dates on the smaller stone marking her grave in the family plot.

Link to download and view family sheet for Sarah B. Mulholland (PDF)

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The above picture is from a set that shows Sam and his siblings in a collection held by the Parker family in which the two women were not identified. Eliza Jane Mulholland Parker (often called Lil) can be identified from the many other images of her in the collection. Given the age of the other sister in this photo, the girl on the left most likely would be Sarah as she does not match pictures of any other of the daughters from this family.