James S. Sanders (Or Do You Spell It Saunders?)

Curious about the administrator of Luther Smith's estate, I looked into James S. Sanders and found that he was a long-time resident of Winfield Township and usually recorded as James Saunders.

He was born in Virginia in 1809. According to a family tree on Ancestry.com, by 1829 he had moved to Pennsylvania, where he married Mary Haines. The same family tree tells us that the young family left Pennsylvania for Ohio around the mid-1830s. Mary gave birth to a child in Ohio in January 1846, but early in May of the same year Early Land Sales, Lake County shows James S. Sanders buying land in Winfield Township, Lake County, Indiana: 160 acres in Section 16, along the Porter County line. The 1850 Census records James, Mary, and their eight children farming what seems to be the same parcel.

In December 1852, James purchased 80 acres in Section 5, and then in February 1854 another 160 acres — thus, the 240-acre farm we find on the 1874 Plat Map:


(Click on image to enlarge)

The Sanders home appears to be on the north side of 109th Avenue not far east of its intersection with Grand Boulevard. No trace of the home remains as far as I can tell. (As for the 1846 farm, it's now buried under the Lake of the Four Seasons development.)

Here the Sanders family was recorded in the 1860 Census and the 1870 Census. Around 1874, apparently, James got tired of farming. He and Mary moved to Jackson Township, Porter County, where James became postmaster in the village of Jackson Center and started the first store there in 1874, and ran it for a couple of years.[1]

But by the 1880 Census James and Mary had moved to Westville in LaPorte County, and James, now 72, served as a justice of the peace. Living with them was their 16-year-old granddaughter, Melissa Shaw, whose mother, Joanna Sanders Shaw, had died.

James died in 1891 and Mary in 1900.

One would think that Deer Creek Cemetery, the Sanders' neighbor for some 20 years, would hold much evidence of the family, but the only person by the name I can find there is Alma Sanders — about whom nothing is known but her name.[2] I do not know where Joanna Sanders Shaw is buried.

I have satisfied my own curiosity about James S. Sanders, estate administrator, and to judge by the family tree on Ancestry.com, this family has already been well researched.

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[1] Goodspeed and Blanchard (eds.), Counties of Porter and Lake Indiana (1882), p. 203.
[2] I haven't been out to the cemetery to find out why we know her name but nothing else. Perhaps there is a grave marker that is illegible (or blank) but for the name.