Sarah Underdown (1750-1783)

Baptism
Sarah Underdown was born in 1750 and baptised in Northleigh on the 1st March 1750, the eldest child of Thomas and Joan Underdown (nee Cox).

She was their first child and first daughter. She was named after her aunt Sarah who had died just two years before, most likely from Scarlet Fever.

Siblings
Being the eldest of 18 children, it is likely that Sarah spent much of her young life assisting her mother in looking after her younger siblings. Her youngest sibling, Anna, was born in 1775 when Sarah was 25 years old and still living at home. She was still there when the first of her siblings married, her sister closest in age, Jane, who married on the 1st April 1783.

Death
Sarah, too died at a young age, just as her aunt had done. She was buried in Northleigh on the 15th August 1783, aged only 33 years, only 4 months after his sister Jane had married. Her cause of death is currently unknown.

Sarah died in August 1783, two months after the beginning of a major eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland; an eruption that would continue for eight months. The outpouring of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere caused a thick haze to spread across Western Europe, resulting in many thousands of deaths throughout 1783 and the winter of 1784. The summer of 1783 was the hottest on record and a rare high pressure zone caused the winds to blow to the south east. As a result, many crops were destroyed and it is believed to be the cause of many outbreaks of disease during this time - including typhus, dysentery and ‘plague ague’, which was a fever much like malaria. Sarah died in that very hot summer.

Sarah had not married or had children prior to her death. Her youngest sibling, Anna, was 8 years old at the time of her death.