J.B.Y. Bailey

The deepest Bailey ancestor the record reaches, and Chuck’s maternal 6×-great-grandfather on the Fleming line. He was the husband of Hannah Thornsberry and the father of Thomas Bailey, who married Nancy Bartlett in Monongalia County in 1803.

A man with a birthday and no name

The 1998 pedigree chart gives him a date: born 26 May 1732. Precise to the day — which normally means somebody had a Bible page, a register entry, or a gravestone.

And in the same box, in the field where the name goes, it still reads:

I.B.Y. OR J.B.Y. BAILEY

That is how it is printed. Robert Earl had been at this since the 1970s; by 1998 he had a birth date accurate to the day and still could not tell whether the first initial was an I or a J, so he typed both into the name field and left it. Eight years of the record and he would not guess.

It is a small thing and a characteristic one. The same hand that caught an impossible birthplace in a census, and that wrote “no death record could be found for Thomas” rather than inventing one, declined to pick a letter.

(The two are probably not different names anyway: in eighteenth-century hands, capital I and J are frequently the same stroke. Whatever document he was reading likely could not distinguish them either.)

A candidate for future research: the initials, and any first name behind them, are unresolved. The precision of the 26 May 1732 date suggests a source that was never cited.

Sources: the Bailey Family Group Record, compiled by Robert Earl Wildermuth, c. 1990; the 1998 pedigree charts, Chart No. 3, for the birth date.