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.
A long-standing family tradition adds that her mother was a first cousin of Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Checked in August 2026, that claim does not survive — see the note at the foot of this page.
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.
A note on the Benjamin Rush tradition (added August 2026)
The claim that Sarah’s mother was a first cousin of Benjamin Rush was checked against the record in August 2026. It fails on three separate grounds, any one of which would be enough.
It is on the wrong side of the family. The Rush name enters this family through the Plasketts, not the Barneses. William Lucas Plaskett’s own mother was Marie Rush. Sarah’s mother was Betsy Baronette Barnes — no Rush at all.
It is the wrong Rush family. Benjamin Rush’s people were English Quakers: his great-great-grandfather John Rush served as an officer in Cromwell’s army, became a Quaker in 1683, and brought his children and grandchildren to Byberry, in Philadelphia County. The Rush line in this family is German. It runs back through Rockingham County, Virginia to Charles Risch, born 1725 at Idar in Birkenfeld, and before him to Oberstein and to Dudenhofen in Hesse — the surname anglicising Resch → Reish → Risch → Rush. Two unrelated families arriving at the same English spelling is one of the commonest traps in American genealogy, and this is a clean example of it.
The dates do not allow it. Benjamin Rush was born in 1745. Marie Rush was born about 1791. Forty-six years apart, they cannot be first cousins in any ordinary sense of the term.
The tradition is left standing here because it is part of the family’s own account of itself, and because knowing what a family believed is its own kind of history. But it should not be repeated as fact.