Sarah Jeanette Hodge

Sarah Jeanette Hodge, daughter of Nathaniel M. Hodge and Grace Weingarth, was born 17 November 1909 in Pasadena, Los Angeles County, CA. She was by far the youngest of the family. Her sister Margaret was more than eleven years her senior. Sarah might not even have known her sister well had Margaret been like many females of her generation and become a wife and headed off to her own life at eighteen or nineteen. As it was, the sisters continued to live together in the same home until death parted them. Margaret suffered from dropsy -- that being the vague medical term used at the time to describe her condition -- and was too frail to live an independent life.

Nathaniel Hodge passed away when Sarah was only thirteen. This undoubtedly contributed to Sarah becoming self-reliant as an adult. Her mother was of a generation of women unaccustomed to working outside the home, and she did not remarry. The most that Margaret could contribute to the household finances was her earnings as a violin teacher. Sarah therefore was obliged from an early age to apply herself to acquiring practical skills. This was probably not a course she would have otherwise pursued. She had an interest in music and enjoyed other intellectual and artistic activities in keeping with the general sensibilities of the Hodge clan. She was a member of the campus poetry club during her teens. But there was no one else who could “step up.” As soon as she graduated from Pasadena High School in 1928 Sarah took courses at Pasadena Business College and immediately thereafter went to work as a stenographer and bookkeeper. She would continue with both these occupations off and on throughout her career, also spending a stretch as a legal secretary. Her example may have been her aunt Lizzie Weingarth Nelmes, who after her brief marriage had forged on as a single mother, never marrying again. In the early 1920s, Lizzie’s occupation was bookkeeper. (Lizzie would go on to manage and own a woodworking mill for many years.)

In the years after Nathaniel’s death, Grace Weingarth Hodge and her daughters cleaved together in Pasadena as a tight-knit, mutually-dependent unit. Sarah’s responsibilities as the breadwinning member of the trio undoubtedly contributed to her choice never to wed. By the time she was truly single, she was in her early thirties and would have needed to find a romantic figure who not only did not mind marrying an “old maid” but who was not threatened by a woman who knew how to fend for herself. Mother and daughters relocated on one occasion; in the mid-1920s, they said farewell to the home at 1266 N. Raymond Avenue that Nathaniel and Grace had moved into in the 1890s, ending up less than a mile away at 55 N. Pasadena Avenue. (The house at 1266 was razed within Sarah’s lifetime and was replaced with half a dozen very plain quonset-hut-style bungalows.)

(Shown at right is Sarah’s senior portrait from the 1928 yearbook of Pasadena High School.) Margaret Hodge’s heart finally gave out altogether in 1933, at age thirty-five. The loss of her sister stirred an interest on Sarah’s part in genealogy. For the next ten years, i.e. until 1943, Sarah diligently investigated her ancestry. Conscious due to her work environment of the need to file papers in public archives, she submitted a genealogy of the Bugh family (her father’s father’s mother was a Bugh) in 1941 to the Library of Congress, and then did so again in 1943 with a genealogy of the Hodge family. (These works are now available through digital download services via Amazon.com and Googlebooks.com.) She also joined the Daughters of the American Revolution, citing her descent from Peter Bugh. (She was apparently unaware that James Pearcy, grandfather of Nathaniel Martin, had also served in the war.)

In a 1963 letter Sarah sent to her cousin Esther Louise Hodge Cook, Sarah referred to her genealogy work and the degree of intensity she had applied to it: “It makes me tired just to think of it now--but in those days I had the time.” Her comment about having the time is in part a veiled reference to how busy her circumstances became in 1943. By then, her mother had been dead for more than two years, and Sarah was now the sole occupant and owner of the family home at 55 Pasadena Avenue. She didn’t care to linger in such a large place all on her own, and she wanted to live near the ocean. Over the next year or so she arranged for contractors to spruce up the house so that it could be rented out, and got herself moved into accommodations more to her liking in Solana Beach, on the coast of San Diego County.

The improvements to the old house and her relocation naturally interrupted the genealogy work in a major way. In the same 1963 letter to her cousin Esther, Sarah implies she never got back to the research, as if to say her 1943 Library of Congress filings and the end of the single year she spent in the D.A.R. represented a point of closure. Her memory was playing tricks with her. Surviving letters and documents from the mid-1940s make it plain that while Sarah may have ceased looking into the Hodge, Bugh, and Weingarth family trees, she spent at least four years more digging up facts about the Martin/Strader side of her heritage. Her decision to do so proved invaluable to the current understanding of that clan. In some ways, this website is an extension of her mid-1940s effort, because her inquiries triggered the assembling of many of the notes whose content was so critical to what you see here. In particular, her letter to her father’s first cousin Cora Belle Warner Spece in 1947 caused Belle to write to Juliette Martin Savage, the last surviving child of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader, and Juliette replied at length. Juliette’s contribution prompted Belle, her sister Emma Warner Hastings, and their first cousin Lulu Fay Brown Seay to organize what they had managed to glean and distribute it among several of the relatives, to the benefit of later generations. Good show, Sarah.

One of the reasons Sarah chose Solana Beach is that it was close to the legal secretarial and stenography work associated with the local branch of the County of San Diego court. Unfortunately the Solana Beach branch was later closed, meaning that work had to be sent down from the Oceanside branch. On occasion, Sarah also filled in for her counterpart at the Encinitas branch.

Sarah passed away 24 October 1972. She must not have ever sold the place at 55 Pasadena Avenue, because Pasadena is listed as her last residence in the Social Security Death Index. And in the California Death Index, her demise is listed as having occurred in Los Angeles County. So it may be that she moved back to her place of origin toward the end of her life. However, her last letters to the family came from Solana Beach, including the 1963 letter to Esther Hodge Cook mentioned above.

To go back one generation, click here. To return to the Martin/Strader Family main page, click here.