I'm not sure why this receipt moves me so. Perhaps because I found it in a small box with a pocket watch and some letters my grandfather wrote home to his mother in the late 1920s when he was living in Oregon. It was clearly something his parents, Gee & Catherine Conway Sawyer considered important.
William Sawyer or Sawyers (it was spelled both ways) was my great-grandfather Gee Sawyers' older brother and the man who raised him after their father died. William was born in 1840, never married but housed and cared for his younger brother, his widowed mother, his sister Barbary and her children when she was widowed, and was named guardian of two nieces following another brother's death. Gee Sawyer administered his estate and bought the coffin for his older brother. The box holding this receipt was in a trunk in Gee's house in Warrensburg, TN until the house was sold following the death of his last child in 1997.
G. Sawyers to W. Robinson, receipt, 28 Oct 1898. Digital image. Privately held by Nolichucky Roots [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE], 1997.
