The Ancestry of Sarah Barnes Plaskett
Acadian exiles, a cousin who signed the Declaration, and a Mayflower speculation — the deep roots of the family's iron matriarch.
Sarah Barnes Plaskett’s people were French Acadian: the family name was originally Baronette, driven out of Acadia in the British expulsions. Her parents were James Barnes and Betsy (Baronette) Barnes, and her mother was a first cousin of Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence.
She was a granddaughter of Leonard Barnes of Maryland — whose own parents the researchers still argue over (William Barnes and Catherine Cock by one theory; Richard Barnes and Elizabeth Baldoc by another). Family researchers, noting that the names Samuel and Lucas recur in every Plaskett generation, have even surmised a line back to a Samuel Lucas of the Mayflower — a speculation the record neither proves nor quite lets go of.
Grandma Plaskett outlived nearly all of it, dying in 1923 at ninety-six — mother of twelve, banker to the miners, and the nerve of the family for seventy years.