Hannah Thornsberry
b. 1728
d. 1831
Hannah Thornsberry is Chuck’s maternal 6×-great-grandmother on the Fleming line — wife of J.B.Y. Bailey and mother of Thomas Bailey.
Her surname did not disappear when she married into the Baileys: her grandson, Thomas’s eldest son, was named Thornsberry Bailey Jr. (b. August 1804, d. 25 May 1857 in Preston County) — the same pattern of carrying a mother’s family name forward as a given name that appears one generation later in Thomas Bailey Fleming. Twice in this line, a woman’s surname survives as a man’s first name.
Did she really live to a hundred and three?
The Family Group Record gave no dates for her at all. Two of Robert Earl’s later chart sets do, and they agree: born 1728, died 1831.
That is about a hundred and three years — an age that should be doubted precisely because it is remarkable. Set against it: on those dates she was around fifty-two when her son Thomas married in 1803, which is possible but late, and she would have outlived him. She was born in the reign of George I and died in the year the Baileys’ grandchildren were being born in western Virginia.
Recorded, not adopted. The two sources are not independent — both are Robert Earl’s own database, printed at different times — so this is one claim stated twice, not two claims agreeing. A gravestone or a death notice would settle it, and neither has been looked for.
No birthplace or deathplace is given on any sheet.
Sources: the Bailey Family Group Record, compiled by Robert Earl Wildermuth, c. 1990 (no dates); the printed ancestor charts and the 1998 pedigree charts, which both give 1728–1831.
