Sarah (Rickey) Doty (abt. 1760)

Born about 1760 in Basking Ridge, Somerset Co., NJ

Ancestors

Wife of Zebulon Doty — married about 1778 in Basking Ridge, Bernards Township, Somerset, New Jersey

Descendants

Biography

Sarah Rickey, daughter of Israel Rickey, is mentioned as the wife of Zebulon Doty in the old Doty Genealogy.

However, Israel Rickey had a daughter Sarah (by his second wife Nancy Crowell Burnett), who was too young to have been the mother of Zebulon Doty's children. This daughter Sarah married Lot Southard, brother of Stephen Southard, the husband of Zebulon's eldest daughter Catharine.

Zebulon Doty and Israel Rickey were from the same area (Basking Ridge, New Jersey), and Zebulon did name a son Israel, which is an exceedingly uncommon name. The logical inference here is that Israel Rickey had an elder daughter named Sarah by his first wife Hannah Roy, who had a sister Sarah. Two children with the same name is not unheard of -- it is usually found when the father of the pair of namesakes has two different spouses.

This inference leads to further suppositions that (1) Israel Rickey's first wife was pregnant with daughter Sarah when he married her, and (2) as she died on 24 Sept. (six months after her marriage in March) she gave birth to daughter Sarah, and (3) Zebulon's eldest children Catharine and David were children of an unknown first wife.

If (as we would expect) Zebulon's son Israel (b. about 1785) was the eldest son of second wife Sarah Rickey, this suggests that Sarah married Zebulon in 1784, at the age of 16. Sarah (Rickey) Doty had daughters named Hannah and Phebe -- names that don't appear in the Doty family. Israel Rickey had daughters named Hannah and Phebe as well. In addition, both Israel Rickey's family and Zebulon Doty's family intermarried with the Southard family.

There is actually a way to test all this: An mtDNA test for the daughter's daughter's line of one of Zebulon Doty's younger daughters (the descendants of daughter Phebe's daughter Susanna (Jellison) Singley are well-researched), compared with an mtDNA test for the daughter's daughter's line of a sister or maternal aunt of Israel Rickey's first wife Hannah Roy.

Sources

"The Doty-Doten Family in America: Descendants of Edward Doty, an Emigrant by the Mayflower, 1620" by Ethan Allan Doty (1897).