"So many Johns" — the email of 6 May 1998, six months before the retraction

A printout of an email to a Bartlett researcher he addresses only as JM, dated Tuesday, 6 May 1998, footed with his America Online screen name — RUWILD1968. He was seventy-three and doing genealogy by dial-up.

It matters because of when it was written: six weeks after the confident March 1998 pedigree charts, and six months before the November retraction.

He was already stuck

The charts show four generations of Johns without hesitation. The email does not:

“Now I’ve reached a stumbling block in identifying the parents of John Fleming, born 1781. So many Johns, James, Patricks and Samuels and all in Frederick Co., Maryland. At the advice of Charlotte Fleming, another Fleming researcher, I’ve [held off] for ‘proof’ for awhile to see what may develop.”

That is the retraction, six months early and without the fanfare. The line he had just printed as settled, he privately described to a stranger as a stumbling block — and named Charlotte Fleming as the person telling him to wait for proof. When he did reverse himself in November, it was not a sudden discovery; it was the end of a doubt he had been carrying all year.

He also gives the shape of his whole project in one line: “First I traced my dad’s lineage back to Germany in the 1500s. German records have been kept so thoroughly. Then with little help from my mother I started on the Fleming line.” The German side had gone well because the parish registers existed. The Fleming side was the hard half.

John Roe, at length

Most of the email is a biography of John Roe, Clarissa’s father, and it is the fullest account of him in the papers — enlisting in 1779, marrying Susannah Meeks on 27 March 1779 while stationed at Westfield with the British lines nearby, serving under Lafayette, being at Jamestown for Cornwallis’s surrender, then Essex County to New York City in 1784, and across Pennsylvania to Fayette County in 1790.

On that journey he cannot resist:

“Can you imagine traveling thru the forests … with 3 young children under 8 years of age. I wonder how many times the kids asked, ‘Daddy are we there yet?’ Not a McDonalds in sight.”

The six Roe children are listed with dates, Clarissa first: born 18 June 1782, married John Fleming.

And one date that contradicts a document in this archive. He writes that Susannah “preceded him in death when she died in 1819.” But the Rosier & Roe deed of 7 October 1820 has a Susannah Roe signing her own name, and justices examining her privately on 26 May 1821. Both cannot be right. Either the 1819 death is wrong, or the woman in the deed is a second wife, or — as Charlotte herself cautioned — the deed belongs to a different John Roe. Unresolved, and newly visible.

A farm bought from James Fleming for one dollar

Buried in the John Fleming paragraph is the most interesting fact in the email:

John Fleming … married Clarissa Roe, who bought a 168½ acre farm from James Fleming for a dollar. An old custom, existing today in some cases, where to make the deal legal something of value had to change hands. In 1838, he sold this farm for $2,000 to his two sons, John and Patrick.

A nominal-consideration transfer is what families do. One dollar for 168½ acres is not a sale; it is a gift dressed as a sale so the deed will stand. And the man making it is James Fleming — the name Robert Earl would settle on, six months later, as the family’s true progenitor.

He never connected the two in writing. But a James Fleming handing John Fleming a farm for a dollar around 1803, and a James Fleming witnessing John’s consent for his son in 1827, are the two hardest pieces of evidence in the papers for the relationship the retraction asserts and never demonstrates.

Smaller differences from the typescript

Recorded, not adopted — the thirteen-page typescript was written about the same time and disagrees in places:

	Email, May 1998	Typescript
John Fleming born	Hampshire Co. (as the early chart)	Montgomery Co., Maryland
John Fleming died	“in 1852” — then “3 Nov 1853” two paragraphs later	3 Nov 1853
Married Susannah Prunty	1852	1858 (Charlotte found 1847)
Clarissa died	“probably when her second set of twins were born”	c. 1838 (later: at Sarah’s birth, 1835)
Eli B. born	20 Feb 1831	28 Feb 1831
Sarah	1835, m. Oliver Dotson	10 Jun 1834, m. Capt. Oliver Dotson
Thomas / Clarissa (1823 twins)	spouses swapped vs the typescript	Thomas m. Cassandra Tucker; Clarissa m. Levi Harper

Three different years for the Prunty marriage across his own documents, and two different accounts of when Clarissa died. He was working it out as he wrote, to different correspondents, and the versions did not converge.

And on Lewis, the line he used all his life:

“Lewis remains a kind of enigma to me. I haven’t been able to find many records on him.”

Source: printout of an America Online email from Robert Earl Wildermuth (RUWILD1968) to a Bartlett researcher, 6 May 1998; in his research papers, in Chuck’s keeping. Photographed 2026.