The last documents in this chronicle come from Devon, not Ohio.
On 6 April 1919, Sarah's niece, Emmie French, wrote from Newton Poppleford announcing her own engagement, with a short note from her mother enclosed, addressed "Dear Sister" — from Joanna Paver French, Sarah's older sister.
Emma French Burt and her mother, Joanna Paver Carter French, circa 1920s. Image retouched by Gemini AI.
Sarah, it seems, had written to her sister in a letter now lost, reporting that she had the flu.
Of the Spanish influenza epidemic which had raged across the globe, Joanna wrote, "So you have got the flu and we have had it very bad here, a lot died, they were only bad about a week."42
The epidemic Joanna described in her own village was, by the spring of 1919, still working its way through Ohio as well. The 1918–19 influenza pandemic had struck Ohio in a first, milder wave that spring, then returned that autumn in a far more severe second wave. A third, smaller wave followed through the winter and into the spring of 1919.43
Sarah had the flu by early April 1919 and died 3 May 1919, at her home on Norwood Street, Barberton.
Her physician, Dr. Frank Lahmers, certified that he had attended her from 25 April to 3 May — eight days — and gave the cause of death as Broncho Pneumonia, with an Organic Heart Lesion as a contributory condition. It was standard practice on death certificates of this period to record the immediate, visible cause of death — pneumonia — rather than the underlying influenza that produced it.44
Her daughter Annie was the informant; the certificate gives Sarah's birth year as 1846, four years off the settled 1850 birth register.45She was buried 5 May 1919 at Lakewood Cemetery, Akron.45
Sarah Carter Murch Lehman Houser's tombstone at Lakewood Cemetery, Akron, Ohio.
Later letters from Emmie (French) Burt to Sarah's grandson, Clifford Romig — written during the years from 1919 to 1925 — independently mention an undated return visit Sarah once made to Devon: "we had such fun when she was home with us," one says; another recalls that "Aunt Sarah when home with us used to talk so much about you ... we did have a good time whilst she was with us"; a third states that Sarah "found her out & saw her several times when she came home," meaning Jemima Carter, the wife Sarah's brother Joel had abandoned decades before.46