James Wesley Fleming's birth certificate — the archive's date was wrong

A certified copy of the original county birth register entry, issued at West Union on 23 May 1984 over the signature of Dessie P. Daugherty, Clerk of the County Commission of Doddridge County, and filed by Robert Earl as his Document #12.

Field	Entry
Name	JNO. WESLEY FLEMING
Born	Doddridge County, West Virginia, 20th day of December, 1857
Father	Thomas Fleming
Mother	Martha Fleming
Book / Page	Book No. 1, Page 9, Original Book
Place of Birth	Arnolds Creek
Occupation of Father	Farmer

The archive had the year wrong. He had it right all along.

This archive has carried 20 December 1855 for James Wesley Fleming, and has said so on several pages, against Robert Earl Wildermuth’s own consistent 1857. The reasoning was that he died on 2 October 1940 “recorded as age 84,” which requires a late-1855 birth.

That reasoning is now overturned by a contemporaneous civil registration. Virginia had required births to be registered since 1853; this is Book 1, page 9 of the county’s original register, and it says 1857.

And the reason the death record was wrong is the whole reason this archive exists. Robert Earl wrote of his grandfather’s death:

“At the time of his death, noone knew who his father and mother were, when or where he was born nor his age.”

The “age 84” was supplied by people who, by his own account, did not know how old the man was. It was never evidence. He went to the Doddridge County courthouse in 1984 and got the register entry, and it settles the matter: born 20 December 1857, which made him 82 when he died.

The archive spent this session arguing against him on his own grandfather’s birthday, using an informant’s guess. The certificate corrects it.

What else it confirms

• Thomas Fleming and Martha as the parents, on a county record independent of every chart and typescript — so the Thomas Bailey Fleming → Wesley link no longer rests on the GEDCOM alone.
• Arnolds Creek as the birthplace, exactly as held.
• Father’s occupation: Farmer — the plainest official word on what Thomas Bailey Fleming did for a living, in the year he was still working the fifty acres he had bought from his own father and mortgaged straight back out.

One thing it opens

The register names him “Jno. Wesley Fleming.” Jno. is the standard nineteenth-century abbreviation for John — not James.

Every other source in this archive, including Robert Earl’s own typescripts, calls him James Wesley Fleming. He was known in the family simply as Wesley, which may be why the first name drifted. Complicating it: a later brother is recorded as John E. Fleming, born 26 October 1866, so the household would have held two Johns.

Resolved. The Doddridge County birth register itself — transcribed elsewhere in the same papers — lists the child born 20 December 1857 to Thomas & Martha Fleming as “John W.”

So the 1984 clerk read the book correctly, and Jno. is not an artefact of the certificate. He was registered John W. Fleming. James is a later family usage that stuck, and Robert Earl went on using it because that is what the family had always called his grandfather.

It also explains a duplication: Thomas and Martha registered two sons as John — John W. in 1857 and John in 1866. In the house the first was Wesley and the second was John, a distinction the register does not record.

Source: certified copy of the Doddridge County, West Virginia birth register, Book 1 p. 9, issued 23 May 1984 by Clerk Dessie P. Daugherty; in Robert Earl Wildermuth’s research papers, in Chuck’s keeping. Photographed 2026.