The story
For a long time this branch simply began, with no explanation, at a man born in Baltimore County in 1800. The research gave him a life: Richard Bond was a Methodist itinerant preacher — not, as the family long assumed, a physician. He was received on trial on 20 November 1823, ordained at Winchester, Virginia on 6 April 1824, and rode circuits until his death in Callaway County, Missouri in 1853. The arc is corroborated against the Centennial Volume of Missouri Methodism and the Methodist Episcopal Church's own General Minutes.
An itinerant preacher is a man whose job was to be somewhere else every few weeks, and the records follow the circuit rather than the man. The Great Falls circuit he rode has now been placed in Baltimore County — a small-sounding result that is the first record-based bearing this family has ever had on where it comes from, because under Methodist practice a candidate is recommended by the conference where he lives. His own parents are still unknown. Everything before 1823 is blank, and that is the family's oldest open question.
He married Eliza Ann Thompson of Westmoreland County, Virginia, and the family began using her surname as a given name immediately — it has been travelling down this line for six generations. Their son Dr. John Barnitz Bond was born at Gettysburg in 1836, a generation before the battle, and was raised in Missouri. His war, as the Arkansas Gazette told it at his death: he enlisted in the Missouri State Guard in 1861, was made a surgeon after the battle of Lexington, went into the Confederate army as surgeon with Little's division of Price's army, and crossed into the Trans-Mississippi Department in 1863, where he became medical purveyor of Arkansas at Little Rock. That account is the obituary's — no service record has been read yet. He stayed in Little Rock, practised medicine, went into the drug business in 1872, and died in 1915 at Warren, in the Bisbee copper district of Arizona, while visiting his daughter.
He married Julia Sterling of Little Rock, who lived to ninety-three. And here the research corrected something the family charts had wrong for years. Julia's mother was long recorded as Ellen Lofton Willett. Ellen is in fact the aunt — the sister who raised the orphaned girls after Julia's real mother, Sarah W. Willett, died at twenty-four. The 1842 marriage return survives in manuscript and records the bride as “Miss Sarah W. Willett, aged sixteen”; her gravestone in Mount Holly Cemetery reads only “MY SISTER” and names nobody. Reading a census household as a family is exactly how this kind of error gets made — and Sarah is deliberately left unattached to parents rather than joined on a guess.
Their grandson John Barnitz Bond lived and died in Little Rock, and the addresses are worth keeping together: he married Alice Plunkett on 30 April 1914 at 1719 Arch Street — a wedding in a house rather than a church — and he died in 1922 at 2600 Arch Street. His daughter Josephine was three.