Pinkowski Files

Sadowski (Sandusky) Jacob
Surveyor. The son of John Anthony. Born in 1750 in Poland. In 1770 came to Kentucky and Ohio. In 1773 a member of Captain Thomas Bullit's surveying party. Helped Bullit to lay out the present site of Louisville. In 1774 a member of surveying party under James Douglas. Helped to found Harrodsburg, the earliest settlement in Kentucky. Cut his way through the wilderness to the Cumberland River, and in canoe descended the Mississippi to New Orleans.
From: "Who's Who in Polish America" by Rev. Francis Bolek, Editor-in-Chief; Harbinger House, New York, 1943

Behind a Kentucky Pioneer
by Edward Pinkowski
Published in: Zgoda, Vol. 126 No. 20; Oct. 15-31, 2007
In his will of June 28,1830, Jacob Sodowsky, as he signed it, or so it was read when the will was transcribed into the records of Jessamine County, Kentucky, the first child he had with his second wife, Elizabeth Evans, stands out in bold relief. He called her Peggy, although her proper name was Margaret, and noted that she had already gone to eternal rest. As Patrick Andersen wrote in 2001 in the genealogy of the family, Margaret Sodowsky married John Dedman February 13, 1808, in Jessamine County, Kentucky, and did not list any of their children. Neither did Jacob Sodowsky.
In his last will and testament this is the item that sticks out like a sore thumb: "I have already given to my daughter Peggy Dedman, dec'd, four hundred dollars and it is my wish that her children shall receive what I intended for her. Agreeable to my estimate there is yet nineteen hundred dollars to be given them, which I want to divide equally with them after deducting the money that may be spent in educating the small children by executors. The money to pay those legacies is to be raised by selling all my stock and perishable property and the hire of all my Negroes not willed till my wife's death and then the sale of a small piece of land that I have not willed, if this should not be sufficient to pay off the legacies equal to twenty-three hundred dollars each in the way above described." Jacob Sadowski, to use the correct spelling of his name, used the $400 to buy a female slave for his daughter.
ARTHUR SZYK
Who were the children? Patrick Andersen, Marie Evans and other family historians did not know their names. It's surprising that Jacob Sodowsky, who wrote the will, wasn't better known to his children and their descendants. Arthur Szyk, who was born and raised in the Jewish community of Lodz, Poland, portrayed Jacob Sadowski as the progenitor of the Sandusky elan in America rather than his grandfather, Anthony Sadowski, who came from Poland in the early 1700s and left only one son to carry on their last name. Since it was first exhibited in the Polish Pavilion of the New York's World's Fair in 1939, Szyk's archaic painting of Jacob Sadowski has appeared again and again in newspapers, predominately Polish ones, and dealers still sell postal sized copies of it.
In case you didn't know, Jacob Sadowski was born in Virginia, now West Virginia, and was twenty-two years old in 1773 when he first headed to Kentucky, then a wilderness and part of Virginia, with a surveying party to survey land for veterans of the French and Indian War. The work didn't last long. For the next eight years he jumped in and out of the wilderness like a wild deer, exploring land in Kentucky and building a family in Hampshire County, now in West Virginia. After the war of independence, he moved with his wife, Jemima Vause, who had spent her childhood in Indian captivity, and two children to Kentucky. Exactly when his first wife died and he married again are not certain.
CHILDREN
Hiding behind the scenes of Jessamine County, where Jacob and Elizabeth Sadowski spent their married life, were the children of John and Peggy Dedman who were born and raised on the farm next to them. No one on the Sandusky website has ever, to my knowledge, brought up all their names and birthdays. Bob Warner, one of the descendants of these children, gave this information, which looked like they came from a family Bible, on another website, in 2001. The children were Larkin Dedman, who was born January 19, 1810; Mariah Dedman, January 14, 1812; Eliza Dedman, November 29, 1814; Taliaferro Dedman, 1816; James Dedman, September 5, 1818; and Mary Ann Dedman, July 18, 1820. No doubt Jacob and Elizabeth Sodowsky, who both died in 1832, saw the children grow up on their land, buried Peggy, and attended the wedding of John Dedman and Sarah Philips, daughter of R. D. Philips, on March 31, 1826. Two more children were born to this union. No matter what the children had coming to them, the Dedman family moved to St. Joseph, in northwest Missouri, where the head of the family died in 1832. Hence the family was scattered and hard to trace. Additional evidence is needed to cover them.
Bob Warner posted a lead to his great-great-grand-father, Taliaferro Dedman, who turned up in the 1850 census of Alexandria, in Clark County, Missouri, with his third wife, Elizabeth S. Gantrell, whom he married May 25, 1848, and four children - John, 11, who was born in Illinois by his first wife. Mary McIntire, whom he married April 5, 1838; Jacob, 8, and Margaret, 5, who were born in Missouri by his second wife, Jean Arthur, whom he married April 22, 1841; and Laura, 1, who was born in Missouri by Elizabeth Grantell.
HOG DRIVERS
Alexandria, where a man opened a ferry service across the Mississippi River in 1824 and started the settlement, also attracted two of Taliaferro's brothers, James, who was a direct descendant of Anthony Sadowski, and John, who was not, because his mother was in a different bloodline, and their families. In the case of James Dedman, he married a woman from Kentucky and they had at least two children in Missouri, Johnanna, who was 6 years old in 1850, and Edward, who was a year old. Both the father, who had a grocery store, and his son, who later opened a restaurant, served the meat packers who came to Alexandria. It's hard to believe that flood-plagued Alexandria, now down to 60-odd families, was at one time as hogwild as St. Louis and Chicago. When the descendant of Anthony Sadowski had his store, the streets of Alexandria were always filled with hog drivers who brought hogs from other parts of Missouri to the slaughter houses along the Des Moines and Mississippi rivers. The hog drivers filled the air with this ditty:
Hog up. Hog up.
Forty cents a day and no dinner.
Straw bed and no cover.
Corn bread and no butter.
Hog up. Hog up.
Unlike his father who worked in a meat-packing plant, Robert, who was born in 1864 to Taliaferro and Elizabeth Dedman, raised hogs on a Missouri farm. According to the 1930 census, the last one available for research purposes, he and his wife, with whom he raised three children, were still raising hogs.