On 4 June 1880, a census enumerator working the standard federal door-to-door method — recording whatever names and facts a household gave, with no way to verify any of it — wrote down the household of Joseph Nash, 33, a moulder born in Ohio; his wife Sarah, 30, born in England; an eight-month-old daughter also named Sarah; and a servant, Anna H. Clyde, in Buffalo, New York.18
Nothing in the census itself says "Nash" is really "Lehman" — the identification rests on age, birthplace, occupation, and timing lining up, not on a document that states it outright — but a city directory from 1886 lists the same man at the same trade: "Nash, Joseph, molder, 240 Forest ave."19
Adopting a new surname for private purposes was not, by itself, illegal under nineteenth-century American common law, so long as it was not done to defraud anyone.20 The infant daughter, born roughly six months after Sarah vanished from Akron, is the girl the family later knew as Sadie.
Sadie Steward, circa 1960s, daughter of Sarah Carter Murch Lehman. Did she resemble her mother? No photo of Sarah has been found.
For years, she was unsure whether her father was James Murch or Joseph Lehman.
The question was addressed in a letter to Sarah's grandson Clifford Romig from a Devon cousin when he was a young man in his 20s: "your Grandma married three times first to Sadie's father James Murch, Kingsbridge, Devon, then to your Ma's father Lehman & then to Wesley Houser."21
A second daughter, Annie, was born into the Buffalo household on 1 June 1884.22 Two certified copies of her birth, drawn from the same underlying register entry, had been sent to a Carter descendant by a solicitous Buffalo city clerk. The first version named Annie's parents as Sarah and Joseph Nash. When the genealogist wrote back, objecting that the father's surname was Lehman and not Nash, the clerk added the extra surname to the end, resulting in "Joseph Nash Lehman" named as the father.23