As I was making one last check of everyone associated with my Fielden line, I noticed that Ancestry had provided me with more potential data on Sarah Catherine Rogers.  One source, a memorial for Sarah Rogers on findagrave.com blew a whole in my findings for June Bennett Fielden’s parentage.

First, the memorial for Sarah doesn’t mention a daughter named June Bennett.   Then I finally found the 1880 census records for Richard Bennett and his first wife Mary Jane Briscoe.  It’s highly unlikely that Mary Jane died, Richard married Sarah and had June all in a year.  Sarah was a widow in 1880, listed as Sarah Brown.  The newspaper article about Richard listed her as Sarah Catherine (Rogers) Maddox so somewhere during 1881 she had to have been married to a Maddox fellow as well.  Not very realistic.

The memorial on Find A Grave also lists her Maddox husband as Daniel Maddox who died in 1896.  Not a lot of divorces back then, so that meant she probably didn’t marry Richard Bennett until after 1896.  The newspaper article stated that Richard died in 1897, so that would mean that they weren’t married for long.

On top of all that, the 1880 census data indicated that Richard was born in 1846, not 1810.  This was confirmed further in the Kentucky Death Records database which also provided a date of death in 1901, not 1897.  This date of death was also confirmed by the database for Headstones Provided for Deceased Union the Civil War Veterans.  This, in conjunction with a 1900 census entry for Richard and Sarah made the 1898 marriage record for them more believable.

Based on all this, June Bennett’s mother is not Sarah Catherine Rogers, but Mary Jane Briscoe.  Moral of this story:  Don’t make random assumptions, and don’t always believe what you read in the newspaper, or on the internet.