Victorian Sweetheart Wins Over the Wrong Michigan Suitor
What could possibly go wrong on a blind date?
After hearing about a beautiful and talented piano teacher at a boarding school in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a male caller from Kentucky took one look at the woman he stood before and voted she was not good enough. But my great-great-great-grandmother Sarah Jane Daglish (1815–1872) was not who he thought her to be.
Sarah was the second-born daughter of William Daglish (1780-1849), a Scottish tailor from New Castle Upon Tyne. The caller, Mr. Lovell Rousseau (a future Civil War Brigider General), wanted to meet the first. Fortunately, the rejection worked in Miss Daglish’s favor and she met her prince charming that very same day by way of the mistaken identity.
Daglish sisters play “twins” to make ends meet.
Prior to immigrating to America, Sarah’s father, William Daglish, ran a well-established tailoring business in England. The Daglishes were members of the “Landed Gentry” — an upper class, not by bloodline, but land ownership and the comfortable inflow of rental income. Family legend says both William’s daughters developed their musical talent under the tutelage of Ferdinand Reis, a prodigy of Ludwig van Beethoven.
During the first Cholera epidemic, their mother, Mary, met her untimely death when the girls were still nine and twelve. Shortly after, the widower was enticed by tales of virtually free land in Western America (likely a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830). William hoped to get in on the deal.
After a six-week sail across the Atlantic, the teen sisters and their father landed in New York for a brief stay before relocating to swampy, mosquito-riddled Saginaw in Michigan Territory. At eighteen and twenty-one, the young ladies found employment teaching music at a women’s boarding school in Kalamazoo… but there was only one job opening. Undeterred, they took weekly turns at the keys and shared a paycheck.
Is one cousin’s loss another’s gain?
While working in the Detroit area one summer, Mr. Lovell Rousseau (1818–1869) arrived with his cousin, James (1812–1882), a medical student acting as an escort. As providence would have it, they came on Sarah’s workweek. Considering both women look quite similar, perhaps Lovell thought he had seen enough and never gave Sarah’s older sister Mary Ann another thought. But Sarah left an unforgettable impression on James.
After this chance meeting, James Rousseau courted Sarah from a distance. Adhering to tradition, Mr. Daglish may have stalled their relationship until Mary Ann was properly matched. When she agreed to wed a fabulously wealthy judge from Saginaw in 1838, two years later, Sarah and James married and moved to the Rousseau’s tobacco plantation in Kentucky.
Within five years, Sarah was back on a boat. This time, she rode a ferry along the Des Moines River to Territorial Iowa. Back then, their three-hundred-plus acreage outside of Knoxville was simply named for the dense forest it was: Elm Grove. Here, Sarah continued to teach piano and raise a family in comfort, with luxuries only a doctor’s wages could provide. Despite this, he could never produce a cure for her debilitating rheumatism.
In desperation, James chartered a wagon train to San Bernardino, California, guided by Nicholas Earp, father of the Wild West celebrity, Wyatt (also on the journey). Perhaps a warmer, drier climate was the solution. One month into the 1864 migration, the Victorian immigrant would read in the papers about the now decorated Brigadier General Lovell Rousseau on the vice-presidential ticket, running against Mr. Andrew Johnson. He lost the vote.
Who came out ahead?
I wonder if this public rejection may have brought a delicate eyebrow raise or fleeting smirk to Sarah’s face, as she rode toward the Pacific sunset with her devoted husband who was never second best to her.
Paradoxically, if Sarah and Lovell had both been chosen by their hopefuls, they might have been the seventeenth President and First Lady of the United States of America.
The above was originally published in The Stars In Your Family, Short Story Anthology (Southern California Genealogical Society, 2020). Reprinted with permission.
Want to know more?
For an in-depth genealogical report on how the Rousseau family is linked to the Kentucky family of Abraham Lincoln, see the Spring 2022 journal issue of the Michigan Historical Review, published by the Historical Society of Michigan with the support of Central Michigan University. (Read the abstract here.)
For a further look into the 1864 covered wagon journey the Rousseaus took with the Earps, check out A Day In The Life… with Sarah Rousseau, a month-by-month look at the adventure and the people involved.
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