Three years after burying Joseph, on 21 April 1897, Sarah married a third time, to Wesley Houser, a younger man from the same township.36
An 1891 Summit County plat map — six years before Sarah married Wesley — shows the Lehman family's own land parcel sitting directly beside land held by the Houser family, and the Houser household is separately documented in the same township as early as 1880.37
No document says Sarah and Wesley knew each other before Joseph died. No document says they did not. Karla wonders whether this repeated proximity — neighboring land and a marriage that followed three years after Joseph's death — meant something more than shared property lines.
The marriage did not last.
Sarah filed for divorce in April 1901, dismissed that first suit "without prejudice to a new action," and refiled.38 The decree, entered 23 December 1901, found Wesley Houser "guilty of gross neglect of duty toward plaintiff" and "guilty of habitual drunkenness for three years next preceding the filing of plaintiff's petition." The court restored Sarah to "her former name of Sarah Lehmann."39
She was confirmed as owner, in her own separate right, of the twenty-five acres in Coventry Township and two lots in the Kenmore Allotment — real estate the decree states "were purchased from and are now her separate property and estate, and that the defendant contributed nothing to the purchase or the improvement thereof."39
It was the same farm property Sarah had owned and lived on with Joseph Lehmann.