Where are all the Sawns?

For a name with only four letters, Sawn is probably one of the most mispronounced surnames around.  Since the mind reads what it wants, the name usually comes out as “Swan” or “Sean”.  Not only that, there’s just not many of us around.  According to the 2000 census data, there were only 142 occurrences of the surname Sawn ranking it as the 114,116^th most popular surname in the US.  Sawn family members show up in only about 20 states with the biggest concentrations in New York, New Jersey, and Florida.

Yet the family has been around the US for a while.  The earliest record I have found to date is the subscription for the purchase of a book in 1794 by Daniel Sawn.  He was listed in the book “Some account of the city of Philadelphia, the capital of Pennsylvania, and seat of the Federal Congress; of its civil and religious institutions, population, trade, and government; interspersed with occasional observations” by Benjamin Davies as on of the subscribers for “The Plan of Philadelphia”.  He also appeared as a subscriber to a book by William Guthrie titled  “New System of Modern Geography”, published in 1795.  Next, Daniel shows up in the 1800 census in Roxborough Township in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Henry and Susannah Sawn, who most likely were living with Daniel during the time of the 1800 census first appear in Camden, New Jersey in 1809 as members of the first class of the Third Street Methodist Episcopal Church.

It is from these two gentleman that the majority of Sawn’s currently living in the US descend.  There is one other Sawn family.  These are descendants of an individual from Germany named Frederick  Zahn (b 1875), whose son William (b 1845) legally changed his name to Sawn in 1871 while a resident of Michigan.

So chances are, if you’re a Sawn living in the US, you’re related to someone in this tree.