My Quest to Find John Jones - part II

Finding documentation of ancestors who lived in the United States or the British colonies before the mid 1800s can be a daunting task. Census records, a common source of information, didn't list anyone except the head of household before the 1850 census. There were no legal requirements to record births, marriages, or deaths until around 1900 in many localities. Many people were living in sparsely populated locales and moving often as new territories were settled. This means churches were not always established and therefore we do not have the benefit of church records that can be a great source of information. The one thing that was usually recorded was anything regarding wealth and land. It was deemed important to keep careful record of who owned a plot of land which gives us records of buyers and sellers (or grantors and grantees) and descriptions of the plots. Court records, which could include a variety of matters including wills and probate of estates, were also found even in that early time period. 

Television programs that show ancestry discoveries from early eras make finding needed documentation look fairly easy, but it isn't. It is usually a matter of putting puzzle pieces together - when you don't have an idea of the final picture and where some of the pieces have been lost. Therefore, it is rare to find complete and definitive documentary evidence of families in that time period. Usually a researcher will put together documents and explain the conclusions drawn from them with the hope that other researchers will agree with the conclusions. Unfortunately some researchers, especially beginners, may draw unfounded conclusions which come to be erroneously accepted by descendants who do not know on what information the conclusions were drawn.

Another issue is that of names. In early America, many names were so-called Biblical names which were limited in number. In addition, families often named children for family members and may or may not have continued naming traditions from their fatherlands. Consequently we find many people with the same name; it is difficult to sort them out and be certain you have found the correct person. Even in this day, a daughter of mine came across a woman with the exact same name who lived on the other side of the country and my son knew a young man in a neighboring high school who shared his name. Neither are related to our family.

So looking for John Jones is indeed looking for a needle in a haystack. Jones is a very common surname. In the Indiana county where John died in 1847, there were two other John Joneses living in the same rural county in the 1840 census. So it isn't hard to find a John Jones; it is hard to decide if the John Jones who has been found is the correct one. To complicate things, we do not know where our John Jones lived in his early years. While various researchers have concluded differing birth places and birthdates for him, none of them that I have seen are even near to being conclusively proven.

This lengthy introduction is given to acquaint all of John's descendants with the difficulties of this line. As I have come across Joneses with unusual given names, I sometimes am envious that we don't have a few of those unique names on our line to make things easier.

How do we know the basics of John Jones' information? There are three main sources that give us a beginning. First is that John's son-in-law James Stapleton Lewis (for convenience referred to as JSL) knew him and recorded some information about him. We have what has come to be called JSL's journal; however, what we have is more like a memoir. The notebooks in which he recorded things were divided between his descendants when he died. In the 1960s, family members collected the notebooks that could still be located and had them typed into a manuscript. Until I write more about the references to John Jones in JSL's writings, you can read some of it in earlier blogs on this site including JSL's history in blogs from 2016 and in two 2011 blogs: August "The Clinton County, Ohio Connection" and September "Greene and Clinton County, Ohio Results."

A granddaughter of JSL and Anna Jones, Clara Lewis Hall (daughter of Wilford Woodruff Lewis) was interested in family history. She collected information and did some research. Some of her information seems to be from oral history and family stories and doesn't include documentation unfortunately. I have found sources to confirm much of what she shared though some dates or names were not quite correct. Nevertheless, her work at a time when information was much more difficult to access is a treasure for JSL and Jones descendants. It is primarily from her that we have some information on John's siblings.

A descendant of James Stapleton Lewis' brother Joel also had a great interest in family History. Arthur Kennedy Love spent many years collecting information and researching the Lewis line. In the mid 1930s he published several editions of a Lewis Newsletter. He had corresponded with JSL as well as some of his children and grandchildren. In publishing this Lewis information, he also gave us some information on Anna Jones.

My intent in these blog posts on John Jones is to highlight specific periods of his life or of his relationships and share what is known and from what sources as well as areas that need further research. The next post will focus on his marriage to Sarah Sumpter in Virginia in 1790. If you have specific questions, please reach out to me either through comments on this blog or on the James Stapleton Lewis Families Project facebook page.