The father who would have been three years old

What happened

Thomas M. Jones was a direct ancestor with not one citation to his name. The tree gave him a birth about 1817 and a wife called Selena, and neither had ever been checked against a record. The birth was impossible on the tree's own terms: his daughter Mary Ann was born in January 1820 and Susan in 1825, so the man as entered would have fathered one at three and the other at eight. Nobody had done the subtraction, because nobody had looked — the Temple branch as a whole was well sourced, and an average hides a pocket.

Then the record answered. Essex County, Virginia: a Guardian's Bond of 16 June 1834, in the sum of $4,000, recorded in the Guardian Book of 1831–1837, binding John Jones (B) as guardian of “Dorothea June, Mary Ann, Ellen and Susan Jones, orphans of Thomas Jones deceased.” Four sisters — two of them new to this tree that afternoon — and a father dead by June 1834. His dates were corrected from the bond and from nothing else: born before 1800, which is a bound from the record (a child born in January 1820 means a father born by about 1799), deliberately not a fresh estimate; died before 16 June 1834.

The wife took a second book. A chancery cause filed in the same county in September 1837 — thirty-five pages, all read — recites that the four girls “are the only children of the said Thomas M. Jones and Keturah his wife.” The clerk had begun to write Susan, eye-skipping from two lines above, struck it, and wrote Keturah; the strike is on the image. There was never a Selena. The same cause says Keturah survived her husband and died during 1837, and that the guardian John Jones was the children's grandfather — which sources Thomas to his own father in the same breath.

One more document closed the circle from the side. Orlando S. Jones's will of 1861 calls both Susan and Mary Ann “my niece,” so their father was Orlando's sibling — the missing older brother this junction had hunted for was never missing. He was misdated.