Daughter of Robert and Eliza Iveson. Sarah was a nurse. Wife of Lewis J. Heist, also of British heritage, a carriage trimmer (b. abt. 1826, PA 1880), Sarah applied for a Civil War window's pension in Aug, 1890. Also mother of Frank Heist, b. abt. 1858. She was the 12757th burial in Highwood. It appears Sarah's husband, Lewis, was a bigamist. He is found in Pittsburgh until the 1860 census when he shows up in a Mississippi census, b. PA, correct age, same occupation of carriage trimmer, with a woman named Martha Cooksey, who is living as his wife, and two young sons, one also named Frank, born in Mississippi, who bear his surname, so he seems to have either been there for a few years or have made frequent trips there, probably on a riverboat down the Ohio River, where he may have been working, as a carriage trimmer, installing and fitting seats on passenger steamboats. After the Civil War breaks out he returns to Pittsburgh, serves in the PA militia, and is found in city directories and censuses again through 1870. There are statements in Sarah's widows pension file stating he drowned in July 1873, in Cincinnati, Ohio, body not recovered...for numerous reasons, I doubt them, believing he faked his death, intending to return to his Mississippi family, however, it looks as if they perished in one of the two massive cholera epidemics that swept their area a few years after his last trip there. Sarah did not receive his pension until 17 years after his death, having to train and work as a nurse to support herself and their children after he left.
Daughter of Robert and Eliza Iveson. Sarah was a nurse. Wife of Lewis J. Heist, also of British heritage, a carriage trimmer (b. abt. 1826, PA 1880), Sarah applied for a Civil War window's pension in Aug, 1890. Also mother of Frank Heist, b. abt. 1858. She was the 12757th burial in Highwood. It appears Sarah's husband, Lewis, was a bigamist. He is found in Pittsburgh until the 1860 census when he shows up in a Mississippi census, b. PA, correct age, same occupation of carriage trimmer, with a woman named Martha Cooksey, who is living as his wife, and two young sons, one also named Frank, born in Mississippi, who bear his surname, so he seems to have either been there for a few years or have made frequent trips there, probably on a riverboat down the Ohio River, where he may have been working, as a carriage trimmer, installing and fitting seats on passenger steamboats. After the Civil War breaks out he returns to Pittsburgh, serves in the PA militia, and is found in city directories and censuses again through 1870. There are statements in Sarah's widows pension file stating he drowned in July 1873, in Cincinnati, Ohio, body not recovered...for numerous reasons, I doubt them, believing he faked his death, intending to return to his Mississippi family, however, it looks as if they perished in one of the two massive cholera epidemics that swept their area a few years after his last trip there. Sarah did not receive his pension until 17 years after his death, having to train and work as a nurse to support herself and their children after he left.
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