Over on the Twisted Twigs on Gnarled Branches Facebook page, I saw a meme that all careful genealogists should live by:
"Undocumented Genealogy is Mythology"
How true that is, especially so when dealing with brick wall ancestors. While we continue to search for the true genealogical origin of Baldwin Lunsford, a certain degree of mythology continues to be perpetuated through online family trees.
Once a year or so I dare to venture into the leading repository of undocumented and questionable family trees, Ancestry.com, looking for any new leads on Baldwin. This is usually a lost cause but there are some interesting connections between Baldwin and various William Lunsfords from colonial Virginia. These almost always link back to the elusive Sir Thomas Lunsford. Never mind that there is absolutely no evidence that Sir Thomas left any sons in either Virginia or England from which said Williams could have descended. None of the trees provide source citations. and the owners rarely reply to my inquiries. When they do respond they tell me they just "got that off Ancestry.com".
Sigh................
We know from Jim Ball's careful research that Baldwin likely had an older brother, Rodham Lunsford, who served in the Virginia Line during the Revolution and removed to Lincoln County Kentucky shortly after the war. From Jim we learn:
"Upon his return from the military, Rodham became the administrator for the estate of Amos Lunsford in 1784 and ordered to perform an inventory. This he undertook and it is known that a deed was granted Baldwin Lunsford by Rodham to clear the estate of Amos. Most interesting is that the Administration Bond was signed by "George (X) Lunsford" and that this George was unquestionably Rodham as noted in the court records (March 1784 Court; Minute Book 6, page 255). More to this is that there was a George Lunsford who left an estate in Fauquier in 1781. His estate was administered by George Carter who, along with George Cordell, posted a bond of £40,000. There is evidence this George Lunsford was a resident of the county of Fauquier as he was a jurist in 1780.
Rodham Lunsford married Clement Ball in 1786. In 1792 Baldwin Lunsford married Ann Ball, Clement's sister. This alone leads one to believe Rodham and Baldwin are brothers, but their relationship to Amos (d. 1784) or George (d. 1781) is not clear."
So who were Amos and George Lunsford? Was one the family patriarch? Another a brother to Rodham and Baldwin? Maybe an uncle? And why would Rodham use the "George" alias at one point? As you might expect, none of the online trees for Baldwin ever mention an Amos or George Lunsford. Complicating matters there appears to have been other unrelated Rodham Lunsfords in the Virginia Northern Neck at this time.
Who knows if we will ever be able to get Baldwin's paternity figured out using standard paper-based genealogy records. This is why I'm trying my best to break through the brick wall with DNA testing. So far I've tested three males outside of our Fauquier clan who claim ancestry to Virginia. But they don't match our Y-chromosome profile. Neither do males in another Lunsford DNA testing project. Likewise we have no DNA matches to anyone in genealogically relevant time frames suggesting a non-paternity event since the founding of Virginia. Its almost like we just dropped in from space and found a happy home in the scenic countryside of Fauquier County.
