The 1803 marriage return — "January 20 John Fleming & Clary Roe"

Small, and about as good as this line gets: a photograph of the actual manuscript, in the minister’s own hand, recording the marriage of Chuck’s 5×-great-grandparents.

Robert Earl filed it under the heading “John Fleming’s Published Marriage Banns,” as Document #112, and typed the reading out beneath the image:

“A LIST OF MARRIAGES CELEBRATED BY THE REVEREND BENJAMIN WEBB IN THE YEAR 1803 20 January JOHN FLEMING & CLARY ROE”

The manuscript is legible in the photograph and supports that reading.

Why it matters

It is contemporary. Not a chart, not a family recollection, not a typescript written 195 years later — a minister’s own return of the marriages he performed, made in the year it happened. Almost everything else this archive holds about John Fleming IV and Clarissa Roe is downstream of Robert Earl’s database. This is not.

It confirms:

• The date: 20 January 1803, exactly as the Family Legacy typescript and the 1998 charts give it.
• “Clary Roe” — the familiar form of Clarissa, used in the record itself. The charts’ “Clarissa (Clary) Roe” was not a modern gloss; it is what she was called.
• The officiant: the Reverend Benjamin Webb — a name the archive did not have.

Four years later this couple had Lewis Fleming, and in 1827 John signed the note letting Lewis marry in his turn.

Robert Earl mentioned this document in his September 1998 letter — “I’ve got copies of wedding bans between John Fleming and John Roe where John and Clarissa were planning a wedding” — and used it to argue that Clarissa never lived in Barbour County. This is the item he meant.

Where the will actually is

The reverse of the sheet carries his source note, and it corrects the provenance this archive recorded for the 1795 will:

SOURCES: John Fleming’s Will, probated on 17 January 1797. Will on file in the Hall Of Records, Annapolis, Maryland.

Pennsylvania Society, Sons of the American Revolution, Genealogy Department, Orlando Library, Orlando, Florida

Two useful things. The will is at the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, not in a county courthouse — findable today by anyone who wants it. And a good deal of the Pennsylvania research was done not by correspondence but at a Sons of the American Revolution genealogy collection in the Orlando public library, a half-hour from his house. It explains how a man in Casselberry, Florida assembled a Maryland-and-Pennsylvania colonial pedigree without ever visiting either state.

(He writes the probate as 17 January 1797 here; the will transcript itself says the witnesses appeared on the 16th. A one-day discrepancy in his own notes, recorded and not resolved.)

Source: photographic reproduction of the marriage return of the Rev. Benjamin Webb for 1803, marked Document #112 / FLEM-48, with the accompanying sources page; from Robert Earl Wildermuth’s research papers, in Chuck’s keeping. Photographed 2026.