"He's on the shelf" — April 1999, and James Fleming was not the final answer

Four email printouts from April 1999 — five months after the “STOP THE PRESSES” retraction — and they change the shape of the Fleming problem again.

This archive has spent several passes assembling a case that James Fleming was his conclusion. These emails show it was not. It was a way-station.

He gave up, and he was leaning somewhere else

Writing to his cousins under the subject line “HE’S ON THE SHELF”:

“Thanks to your good suggestion and after many frustrating hours of trying to piece things together to make a logical descendancy, I’ve decided to turn my back on our John Fleming b. 1781. Maybe something will turn up unexpectedly. Still leaning towards Samuel or Patrick.”

So the sequence of his own positions runs:

Date	John Fleming IV’s father
March 1998	John Fleming III, in a four-John Maryland line — the printed charts
May 1998	“a stumbling block… so many Johns, James, Patricks and Samuels” — already stuck
November 1998	James Fleming — remove John Jr. and John III, insert James
April 1999	“Still leaning towards Samuel or Patrick” — and shelving the question

Four positions in thirteen months, and the last one is neither John nor James. He put the man on a shelf and went to work on the Baileys and Bartletts instead:

“Now I’m turning my efforts to my Baileys and Bartletts. They all left scads of records in Preston and Harrison Counties so maybe I won’t be so frustrated in finding nothing.”

And closed with the joke that gives the thread its name — going off to dust off the shelf and see if old John might be hiding in there.

What this archive is changing. John Fleming IV’s page and the 1795 deed were framed as “James Fleming is probably the answer.” That overstated it. The James Fleming land trail is real evidence and still the best documentary thread in the line — but his own last recorded view was Samuel or Patrick, and the honest summary is that he never settled it and neither has anyone since.

Two candidate names now on the table. A Samuel Fleming he described in 1998 as “one of the original sons,” a justice of the peace who “really cut a swath through Frederick County, Maryland.” And a Patrick — worth noting that the 1820 Virginia census list in his papers records “Patrick — HMP”, a Patrick Fleming in Hampshire County, the county John IV’s death register names as his birthplace.

What he confirms in passing

Two useful confirmations of documents this archive now holds:

“I found many of his records (wedding vow with John Roe, permission for my great-great grandfather to marry Synthia Baily).”

The 1803 marriage return and the 1827 consent note — described in his own words, and Lewis identified as his great-great-grandfather.

He also explains why Taylor County kept failing him:

“John lived in the Eastern Sector of Harrison County before it became Taylor County… I think one needs to search for John’s records in Harrison and/or Doddridge Counties.”

And he was still hunting Lewis’s death: “all I know is that he died in Taylor County c. 1862 after moving back there from Doddridge Co.” He never found it. Lewis’s death is still unverified in this archive.

Taylor County research leads, from Norman Collier

Three of the four pages are a forwarded reply from a Norman Collier, and they are pure practical intelligence — the kind of thing that is normally lost when a researcher dies.

The route is worth noting. Collier answered a query on the HCPD-L list on Friday 23 April 1999 under the subject “Grafton, W Va. ABT 1830–1850”; Charlotte Fleming — the Tucson cousin of the 1995 letters, four years on and now on email — forwarded it the next morning to Robert Earl at FLEMCLAN9 and to a third researcher, Ethel E. Nielsen. So the 1995 network was still running in 1999, and it was still Charlotte who relayed things to him.

What Collier sent:

• Marguerite Baugh, at the Taylor County Library, resident custodian of the Taylor County Genealogy Society — thirty years in the post, would do specific look-ups for the cost of copies. (A 1999 phone number is on the page; not reproduced here.)
• Melba Zinn of Route 3, Box 169, Grafton — compiler of Taylor County, WV Deed Abstracts, Books One and Two, 1844–1852, and available for paid research, “but more expensive.”
• Taylor County, WV Marriages 1853–1905, compiled by Wes Cochran of Parkersburg, 1987 — from which Collier sent a page-indexed list of Fleming marriages running to some fifty entries, from Abbie to Zachariah.
• A Taylor County History of West Virginia, Taylor County Genealogy Society, 1986 — three Fleming write-ups at pages 218–220, both of which, Collier notes, “indicate that the Flemmings came to Taylor County about the time of the Civil War.”
• National Cemetery, Grafton — a “Flemming, John Pvt., 4-19-1864”, a Union burial of April 1864.
• And a deed abstract of February 1845 referring to part of a 300-acre grant to a William McClung “and by him conveyed to John Fleming heirs and Henry Little” — the underlying conveyance dated 28 October 1844, adjoining E. Thomas, on Booths Creek. (The surname breaks across a line on the page; McClung is the better reading, though this archive earlier had it as McClurg.)

“John Fleming heirs” in a Taylor County deed of the 1840s is worth chasing — an heirs conveyance normally has to name them.

And a flat contradiction, which is why the write-ups matter less than the indexes. Collier reports that the county history has the “Flemmings” arriving in Taylor County about the time of the Civil War. Robert Earl’s own census abstracts have a dozen Fleming households in Taylor County at the 1850 census, and this very page carries a Fleming heirs conveyance of 1844. Either the write-ups describe a different family — note that they spell it Flemming, with the doubled m, as does the Grafton burial — or they are simply wrong. The published county history loses to his legal pad.

One entry in the Cochran index is worth a look on its own. The list includes a Henrietta at page 67. The 1870 census sheet records Henrietta Fleming, 13, annotated “Patrick Jr.’s daughter” — orphaned by her father’s death in 1865 and of exactly marriageable age in the years Cochran’s index covers. Page 67 of Taylor County, WV Marriages 1853–1905 is where her married name would be.

Collier’s own verdict on the question they had asked him sits in two words on page one: “Nothing on John.” These pages are dated 23 and 24 April 1999. Robert Earl died on 25 June, two months later. The leads arrived in the same week he put the man on the shelf, and nothing in the photographed papers shows him acting on any of them.

Collier’s verdict on the main question was blunt and correct: “Nothing on John.”

Source: four printouts of America Online email, 23–27 April 1999, between Robert Earl Wildermuth (FLEMCLAN9@aol.com), Charlotte Fleming (flemingc@ix.netcom.com) and Norman Collier (nrmcolli@slip.net), with Ethel E. Nielsen copied; forwarded from the HCPD-L mailing list under the subject “Grafton, W Va. ABT 1830–1850.” From his research papers, in Chuck’s keeping. Photographed 2026; re-read at full resolution.