John D. Turner
also known as John Turner
John D. Turner is a name and a relationship.
He appears on one sheet of Robert Earl Wildermuth’s printed ancestor charts — the one headed Ancestors of Martha Turner — in a single box above his daughter, with no birth, no death, no place and no wife. The chart for Martha is the shortest of the fourteen for exactly that reason: it runs one generation and stops.
The initial, and the wife he could not name
The 1998 pedigree chart adds the one thing anyone has: a middle initial. He is entered as JOHN D. TURNER-0516, with every other field blank.
Beside him, in the slot for Martha’s mother, sits “WIFE UNKNOWN-0518.” Robert Earl had assigned a record number to a woman whose name he never found — a placeholder held open in his database for years. It is a small, exact picture of where this branch stopped.
His daughter Martha Turner was born in March 1832 and married Thomas Bailey Fleming at Parkersburg in 1851, so the family was in western Virginia by the early 1830s at the latest. (Her birth county is itself in doubt — see her page: one chart says Wood, the 1998 chart says Harrison.)
Where to look. Wood County marriage bonds around 1851 would name Martha’s father and often a bondsman kinsman; the 1840 and 1850 Wood County censuses would place the household. Neither has been searched.
Sources: the printed ancestor charts, Robert Earl Wildermuth, c. early 1990s; the 1998 pedigree charts, 22 March 1998, for the middle initial and the “WIFE UNKNOWN” entry.
