The two children she birthed did not live to adulthood, but Sarah Henderson Jacobs Silver nonetheless was mother to the Wilson County branch of my Henderson family. She reared my great-grandmother Bessie Henderson and great-great-uncle Jack Henderson alongside her step-children in Wayne County. Around 1907, she and her husband Jesse A. Jacobs Sr. and his youngest children settled in Wilson in a little cottage on Elba Street, and Jack Henderson followed. When Bessie died, my eight-month-old grandmother Hattie Mae Henderson and later her sister Mamie came to live on Elba Street, too. And she lived long enough to help my grandmother raise her four children in their earliest years. Though she was the direct ancestor of none of us, I recognize and honor Mama Sarah as matriarch to us all.

Mama Sarah and my uncle Lucian, circa 1931.