Thomas Bailey

Thomas Bailey was born in Virginia and married Nancy Bartlett on 21 October 1803 in Monongalia County, Virginia. He is Chuck’s maternal 5×-great-grandfather on the Fleming line.

His daughter Synthia Bailey married Lewis B Fleming in 1827 — the marriage that carries this family into the Fleming, and then the Wildermuth, line. His first name descends through her eldest son, Thomas Bailey Fleming (b. 1830).

His own parents are recorded as J.B.Y. (or I.B.Y.) Bailey and Hannah Thornsberry — the Thornsberry name reappearing in his eldest son, Thornsberry Bailey Jr. (b. August 1804).

A probable brother, and a second Bartlett sister

The Bartlett Family Group Record shows that Nancy was not the only Bartlett daughter to marry a Bailey. On 24 August 1806, three years after Thomas and Nancy’s wedding, her sister Mary “Polly” Bartlett married a Thornsberry Bailey in the Glades of Preston County.

That cannot be Thomas and Nancy’s own son of the same name, who was two years old at the time — and Robert Earl Wildermuth assigned him a separate ID (0334) from the son’s (0310), so he read them as two men as well. The natural explanation is that Mary married Thomas’s brother: another son of Hannah Thornsberry, carrying her maiden name as a given name, which would also be why Thomas’s own boy was entered as Junior. The sheets do not state the relationship, so it stands as inference rather than record.

The family’s recorded places — Monongalia, Harrison, Taylor, and Preston Counties — are all in the northern Virginia panhandle that became West Virginia in 1863.

Source: the Bailey Family Group Record, compiled by Robert Earl Wildermuth, c. 1990.