William Bartlett
b. 1720, Virginia
William Bartlett is the deepest root the maternal line reaches. He was born in Virginia in 1720 and “made his home in Loudon County, Virginia where he raised a family of seven boys.”
He does not appear to have gone west himself. What he did was raise seven sons who all did — and the record of where each of them landed is the most useful thing about him:
| Son | Where he settled |
|---|---|
| William Jr. | near Simpson, Taylor County |
| Thomas | the Glades, Preston County — Chuck’s line |
| Benjamin | near Bridgeport, Harrison County |
| Robert | the West Fork, a few miles south of Clarksburg, Harrison County |
| John | also on the West Fork |
| James | Clarksburg, Harrison County |
| Sanford | also Clarksburg |
Seven brothers left the northern Piedmont and rebuilt the family inside a single cluster of trans-Allegheny counties — four of them around Clarksburg and the West Fork, the others at Bridgeport, Simpson and the Glades. Every county the Bartletts, Baileys and Flemings turn up in for the next century — Monongalia, Harrison, Taylor, Preston — is inside that cluster. Whatever prompted the move, it moved as a family.
His wife
Unrecorded. Robert Earl Wildermuth’s form enters her as UNKNOWN-0339 with every field blank — no first name, no dates, no parents — and the entry repeats, still blank, in the header of page 2. He carried her across the whole record without finding one thing to put down. Seven sons, and nothing at all about their mother.
She is the second woman in three generations of this line to reach the archive without a name, after her daughter-in-law Sarah, whose surname the same compiler left as an open parenthesis.
Two cautions
The form has a circular link. On the same sheet that lists Thomas as William’s son, William’s own Father and Mother fields read Thomas Bartlett-0314 and Sarah-0315 — Thomas and his wife. Robert Earl had reused ID 0325 for two different William Bartletts, the 1720 patriarch and Thomas’s son of the same name, and the records merged. The narrative sketch is unambiguous about the direction, and it is the direction used here. Detail on the artifact page.
FamilySearch disagrees. It gives Thomas an entirely different father — Thomas Bartlett (b. 1733) of Richmond County and Anne Settle. This archive follows the Wildermuth sketch, for reasons set out on Thomas’s page, but the attribution should be read as well-argued rather than proven.
Source: the William Bartlett Family Group Record and sketch (form 0118, 11 July 1990), compiled by Robert Earl Wildermuth.
