Project Scroll Research Note 2026-24: The founders' families of the Cassopolis lodge of 1846: two Sarah Talbots and a doctor's teacher bound for California

Gilbert Cope's Genealogy of the Sharpless Family (1887), read entry by entry, shows that the four charter members of the Cassopolis lodge of 1846 were bound more tightly than by three marriages to the Beall sisters. Dr. Evan J. Bonine's mother, Sarah Talbot (born near Winchester, Virginia, in 1791), and his wife's mother, Sarah (Talbot) Beall (born in 1804), were aunt and niece: Mrs. Beall was a daughter of Samuel Talbot, the elder brother of Sarah (Talbot) Bonine, who had "removed from Wythe Co., Va., to Centreville, Ind., 1822." Bonine therefore married his first cousin's daughter, and the two founders who married her sisters married into his mother's family. The same genealogy puts the doctor's uncle John Talbot's death "about 1846, at Isaac Bonine's, Cass Co., Mich.," and records that both families had come from Tennessee to Wayne County, Indiana, before Isaac Bonine's family moved to Michigan in 1842. Bonine had read medicine with Dr. J. Prichet of Centreville (Mathews, 1882), whom Cope identifies as the husband of Emily Talbot, the sisters' aunt, and who "went over the plains to California, 1849"; his journals, opening on 26 March 1849, are at the Indiana State Library, and an 1849 overland diary of a "Dr. Bonine" is listed by Townley (1988) at the Fort St. Joseph Museum, Niles.

Project Scroll Research Note 2026-24, version 1. The note sets out the record quoted, where it is held, what it changes, its limits, and what was searched before calling it new. Web version: projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-24/.