The Dream

This is the story of how Sarah got her name. It requires a little background information.

I met Bill in the summer of 1974 in the Dallas First Ward building on Turtle Creek. I was working in Dallas for the summer and when I went back to Massachusetts in the fall, we maintained a long distance relationship. I made the trip to Dallas once or twice a month since I had airline benefits through my job with Delta. In the Spring of 1975, Bill came to visit me in New England. We took a trip into Maine to visit some of my relatives and to do some genealogical research on one of Bill’s family lines. In Augusta we had no luck. They wanted to charge us for each name search and would not allow us direct access to the records. So we proceeded to the small town of Garland, Maine where the Haskells had lived in the mid 1800’s. There we found Bill’s 4th great grandparents’ graves and made gravestone rubbings of them. Their names were John and Sarah Haskell. After the cemetery experience, we asked a passer-by where we could find the old town records and were directed to the home of the town clerk. She invited us into her kitchen and cleared the table. Then she pulled the old handwritten records from a high shelf in a closet and spread them out for us to search. We found quite a lot of information, had a nice visit with the clerk and got to play with the kittens that were scampering around the kitchen. All in all a most satisfying family history trip!

Fast forward to May of 1979. Bill and I were married in July of 1978 and Sarah was due on May 6th. We had placed the gravestone rubbings on the wall of our bedroom, just across from our bed. We didn’t know whether we were having a boy or a girl, so we had made a list of 6 girl’s names and 4 boy’s names. One of the girl’s names was Elizabeth Sarah. One morning, a few days before our baby was born, Bill told me about a very vivid dream he had had. In it we were in the delivery room and the baby had just been born. It was a girl! The doctor turned to Bill and asked what her name would be. At that point in his dream, he opened his eyes and saw the gravestone rubbing of Sarah Haskell, closed his eyes and told the doctor, her name is Sarah. So when she was born a few days later, we named our baby girl Sarah Elizabeth. So essentially Sarah is named after her 5th great grandmother, Sarah Haskell!