Thomas Bartlett

Thomas Bartlett is the earliest documented migrant in this archive — a generation ahead of the Wildermuths’ Atlantic crossing and three-quarters of a century ahead of the Eesleys’ move from Ontario into Michigan. He is Chuck’s maternal 6×-great-grandfather on the Fleming line.

He was the second of William Bartlett of Loudoun County’s seven sons, and he did not cross the mountains alone: all seven brothers went, and settled within a day’s ride of one another in Preston, Taylor and Harrison Counties. Thomas took the Glades.

Two independent bodies of evidence describe him. They agree on the shape of his life and disagree on his father and his death year; both are set out below.

What the family’s own record says

Robert Earl Wildermuth’s typed sketch, from his research file of 11 July 1990:

“Thomas Bartlett, one of seven sons of William Bartlett, came to Western Virginia shortly after the Revolutionary War. He was among the early pioneers west of the Alleghany Mountains. He settled in the Glades of what is now Preston County, West Virginia. … Thomas Bartlett died in Preston County, Virginia (West Virginia) in June 1836.”

His Family Group Record (form 0094) leaves his birth blank, gives no parents at all, and enters died and buried, June 1836, Preston County.

His 1998 pedigree chart — eight years later, the last of his sheets — still says died June 1836, Preston County, Virginia, and still leaves the birth blank. He never adopted FamilySearch’s 1832, and he never found a birth date. It also confirms William Bartlett as the father, carrying record number 0325, and gives William’s wife as simply “Unknown-0339.”

What the FamilySearch tree adds

The family GEDCOM, synced from FamilySearch in June 2026, carries the same household under the name Thomas L. Bartlett Jr. and fills in what the family sheet left empty:

• Born 21 December 1756 in Fauquier County, Virginia
• Married Sarah about 1783 in Fauquier County — the Piedmont county east of the Blue Ridge
• Died 1832 in Preston County
• Buried at Union Baptist Church Cemetery, Simpson, Taylor County, West Virginia

The Fauquier marriage is the most useful thing here, because it answers a question the sketch raises and does not settle: where the family was before it crossed the mountains. A wedding in Fauquier in 1783 and a farm in the Glades soon after is exactly the movement the sketch describes as “shortly after the Revolutionary War” — and it makes him about 27 at the crossing.

His father — the argument

Two candidates, and this archive follows the first.

William Bartlett of Loudoun County, born 1720 — the Wildermuth sketch, backed by a second family group record that names all seven sons and where each of them settled. Thomas is the second: “Thomas settled in the Glades, Preston County, West Virginia.”

Thomas Bartlett, born 1733 in Richmond County, and Anne Settle — the FamilySearch tree, which also gives that couple eleven other children whose names overlap heavily with the Loudoun seven (William James, John B, Robert, Benjamin B, James F).

Four things favour the Loudoun household:

• Geography. FamilySearch itself puts Thomas’s birth and marriage in Fauquier County, which borders Loudoun. The alternative father’s family is a Richmond County / North Farnham Parish line on the Northern Neck, roughly ninety miles east and in a different orbit entirely.
• The settlement map. The sketch does not simply assert a father; it places seven brothers in six specific spots — Simpson, the Glades, Bridgeport, the West Fork twice, Clarksburg twice — inside the exact county cluster the Bartletts, Baileys and Flemings occupy for the next hundred years. That is not the shape of a guess.
• An impossible date. FamilySearch has the alternative father, born 1733, marrying Anne Settle in 1748 — at fifteen, to a bride of about thirteen. Something in that record is wrong.
• A misplaced grave. FamilySearch buries Thomas at Simpson, Taylor County, and buries the alternative father there too. Per the sketch, Simpson is where his brother William Jr. settled, not Thomas — who was in Preston County, where both Wildermuth sheets put his death. It looks like a cluster of Bartlett burials at Simpson being attached to the wrong men.

Against: FamilySearch enters him as “Thomas L. Bartlett Jr.,” and a Junior implies a father of the same name. But Thomas named one of his own sons Thomas L. as well, so at least two Thomas L. Bartletts stood in successive generations here — an easy place for a suffix to migrate.

The attribution is well-argued, not proven. A Loudoun County will or deed naming the seven sons would close it.

Note on the form: record 0118 lists William’s own parents as Thomas-0314 and Sarah-0315 — his son and daughter-in-law. Robert Earl reused ID 0325 for both the 1720 patriarch and Thomas’s son William, and the two merged. The artifact page sets out the mechanics.

His death year

June 1836 (family sheet) versus 1832 (FamilySearch). Both put it in Preston County. A probate or estate record would settle it. FamilySearch’s Union Baptist Church Cemetery burial at Simpson is suspect for the reason above.

The Glades

He settled in the Glades — the upland wet meadows of what was then far-western Virginia and is now Preston County, West Virginia. The name is local and specific: a belt of natural open grassland at high elevation, valuable to a settler because it needed no clearing.

Everything the family did afterwards happened within a short radius of it. His daughters married in Monongalia and Preston Counties; the Baileys who married into the family are recorded in Monongalia, Harrison, Taylor and Preston — the whole cluster inside the northern Virginia panhandle that separated to become West Virginia in 1863, a generation after his death.

Wife and children

He married Sarah, whose surname was already lost by the time the family’s genealogy was written down; the typed sketch renders her “Sarah ( )”, with the parenthesis left open, and FamilySearch does no better — it lists her under her married name.

They had thirteen children:

1. Nancy — married Thomas Bailey, October 1803, Monongalia County. Chuck’s line.
2. Elizabeth — married David Cleavenger
3. Catherine — married Joab Woolverton
4. Edith — married a Hopkins
5. Mary “Polly” — married Thornsberry Bailey, 24 August 1806, in the Glades
6. Sarah — married George Brown
7. Starling
8. Charlotte — married John Maulsby
9. Amelia — married the same John Maulsby, after Charlotte’s death
10. Benjamin
11. William
12. Elijah
13. Thomas L.

Two patterns are worth naming. Charlotte and Amelia married the same man, Amelia stepping in after her sister died — a common and practical arrangement in frontier households with children already in them. And two Bartlett sisters married two Baileys three years apart, Nancy in 1803 and Mary in 1806. Mary’s husband cannot be his own nephew Thornsberry Bailey Jr., who was born in August 1804; FamilySearch dates that Thornberry Bailey’s birth to 1782 and his death to 24 January 1853 in Taylor County, which makes him a near-contemporary of Thomas Bailey (b. c. 1780). The likeliest reading is that they were brothers, both sons of Hannah Thornsberry — but neither source states it.

The line forward

Nancy’s daughter Synthia Bailey — born in Preston County, died 1849 in Harrison County — married Lewis B Fleming in Harrison County in 1827, and the descent runs from there: Synthia’s son Thomas Bailey Fleming (b. 1830) → James Wesley Fleming (1855) → Sadye Fleming Wildermuth → the Wildermuths of Marietta.

What is open

His birth date, if the FamilySearch 1756 is not to be trusted. His death year. Sarah’s surname. Documentary confirmation of the Loudoun parentage. And Robert Earl’s own closing line is still the best lead anyone has: “Little research has been done on this ancestor but the Bartlett records are said to be better than average.”

Sources: the Bartlett Family Group Record and sketch (form 0094), the William Bartlett Family Group Record and sketch (form 0118), both 11 July 1990, and the Bailey Family Group Record (form 0019) — all compiled by Robert Earl Wildermuth; FamilySearch person L1ZC-DZF via the family GEDCOM, synced June 2026.