Sarah Anne's father died when she was nine. Her widowed mother Mary soon remarried to Charles Gustavus Dahlgren, of Swedish descent. Her stepfather, who saw great potential in Sarah, provided her with a first-rate education, engaging as her tutor Eliza Ann Dupuy, the same woman who had inspired and trained her aunts Catherine and Eleanor. Later, about 1838–1841, he sent her to Madame Deborah Grelaud's French School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded in the 1790s by a refugee from the French Revolution. Mme Grelaud was a Huguenot, and the school was Episcopal. There Sarah excelled in music, painting, dancing, and languages, quickly gaining fluency in Italian, Spanish, German and French.