John V. Dunbar

John V. Dunbar is the ancestor who carried the Dunbar line from Maine to West Virginia — and the reason the Dunbars, whom Robert Earl Wildermuth remembered as an established Wood County family, in fact began as New Englanders. He is Chuck’s maternal four-times-great-grandfather on the Dunbar branch: John V. → Seth Grosvenor Dunbar → Verona Belle (Dunbar) Fleming → Sadye Irene Fleming → Robert Earl Wildermuth → Terrie Lee → Chuck.

From Readfield, Maine to Bull Run, Wood County

Born about 1804 in Maine, John V. Dunbar appears in the 1850 census at Readfield, Kennebec County, Maine, a farmer, age 46, with his wife Ann (age 37) and seven children. By the 1860 census the whole household had moved south to Bull Run, in the northwest corner of Wood County, (West) Virginia — near Waverly and St. Marys, close to the Pleasants County line — where John is listed as a steam-mill owner. He was still there at the 1870 census, farming, with a property value of $2,500. The family’s relocation between 1850 and 1860 is what planted the Dunbars in the Wood County hill country where his granddaughter Verona would be born in 1869.

A death date, at last

This page long ended with no death recorded. Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1998 pedigree chart supplies one: 22 November 1884, at Parkersburg, West Virginia. He was about eighty, and he had outlived his son Seth by fourteen years.

The same chart gives his birth as 1808. This archive keeps c. 1804, because the 1850 Readfield census records him as aged 46, which the chart cannot outrank. Recorded as a variant.

Ann and the nine children

With his wife Ann Dunbar (b. 1812, Maine; maiden name not yet recovered), John had nine children, all but the youngest born in Maine before the move:

1. Vernum Augusteen Dunbar (b. 5 November 1834; m. Sabina)
2. Seth G. Dunbar (b. 1837) — Chuck’s direct ancestor, the father of Verona Belle Dunbar by Martha Kelley
3. Josephine C. Dunbar (b. 1839)
4. Virginia W. Dunbar (b. 1841)
5. James G. Dunbar (b. 1843; m. “May”)
6. George H. Dunbar (b. 1845; m. Annie/Anice; d. 1920)
7. Mary C. Dunbar (b. 1847)
8. Abbee D. Dunbar (b. 1849)
9. Thomas I. Dunbar (b. 1851)

Source: Wildermuth Family of Marietta, Ohio (Wildermuth & Bain), the “Dunbar, Ann” and “Dunbar, Ann (née ?)” register entries, pp. 108–109 — which quote the 1850 Kennebec County, Maine (Readfield) census, the 1860 and 1870 Wood County, West Virginia (Bull Run) censuses, and the child list from Silas Lucas’s Dotson/Dunbar research. Corroborated by the Eesley/Wildermuth GEDCOM tree.