JESSE LINDSEY’S PARENTS

So far, I have not found a primary source listing the parents of Jesse Lindsey, my great great grandfather. However, based on several pieces of circumstantial evidence, I believe his parents were Henry Lindsey Sr. and Elizabeth Smith of Carroll County, Virginia.

Jesse is not found in the list of seven children of Henry and Elizabeth in Carroll 1765-1815, The Settlements, 1985, by John Perry Alderman, p. 132. According to Alderman, Jesse was not mentioned in Henry’s will or in several deeds from Henry to his children. However, only three children were mentioned in Henry’s will and the deeds were for lands in Carroll County, while Jesse lived in that part of neighboring Wythe County which became Pulaski County in 1839.

According to Alderman, Henry’s children were born in 1792, 1794, 1797, 1802, 1805, 1808, and 1812. The spacing of the early children was two or three years, except for the five year gap from 1797 to 1802. Jesse was born on January 29, 1799, which would neatly fill that five year gap.

Henry Lindsey Sr.’s eldest child was William Lindsey. Alderman said that William Lindsey “lived for some years in Wythe” before he returned to Grayson/Carroll. (Carroll was formed from the eastern part of Grayson County in 1842.) “William Lincy” appeared in the 1820 Wythe Co. census, age 26-45 (actual age 27), with one female his wife Martha’s age, 3 females under 10 (apparently only two of these survived), and one other male age 18-26 – too old to be his child, so my guess is that this was his brother Jesse (age 21). (His father Henry in Grayson was only listed with one son in this age group, accounted for by his son James, age 23.)

Jesse Lindsey bought 90.5 acres on Big Reed Island Creek in present-day Pulaski County for $500 from Francis Allison on August 14, 1827 (Wythe County Deed Book 10, p. 566). William Lindsey bought 105 acres adjacent to Jesse from the same person on the same day for the same amount of money as shown on the previous page of the deed book. Lindsey 1827 Deeds. William, with his wife Patsey (their daughter Sophrina’s marriage record lists her mother as Patsey, a nickname for Martha), sold his land on October 1, 1827, for $600. Based on Alderman, p. 129, Henry Lindsey’s home was on the same Big Reed Island Creek in what was then Grayson County, and not more than ten miles south. Jesse and William had moved away from home - not very far - but far enough for Jesse to be out of the scope of Alderman’s book. (For the geographically-minded, Little Reed Island Creek, the home of Jesse’s Hurst and Wheeler sons-in-law, runs north from Carroll through Wythe into Pulaski, where it joins Big Reed Island Creek right before it runs into the New River.)

William Lindsey moved back to Grayson County by 1830, becoming a Justice and the Clerk of the first county court when Carroll County was formed in 1842.

William Lindsey was one of four people appointed in 1824 to appraise the estate of John Kelly, the father of Catherine Kelly, who became Jesse Lindsey’s wife in 1830. (John Kelly was also the father of Martha Kelly, who married William Runyon. They in turn were the parents of Eliza Jane Runyon, the second wife of William Raleigh Wheeler, whose first wife was Mary Bailey Lindsey, the daughter of Jesse Lindsey and Catherine Kelly. Tests of the mitochondrial DNA of direct maternal descendants of Catherine and Martha proved to be an exact match, which combined with other evidence, demonstrated that the two Kelly women were sisters and the daughters of John Kelly and Elizabeth Cummins.) See Catherine Kelly paper for details.

Jesse Lindsey’s four sons moved to Randolph County, Illinois. According to a biographical sketch on the Randolph County Biographies website, originally in the 1875 Atlas of Randolph County, his second son John H. Lindsey attended the Hillsville Academy in 1854. One possibility is that this was the Ben Thompson Academy in Hillsville, the seat of Carroll County. According to The Lindsay Family, an undated paper by E. Gary Marshall, found at the Carroll County Historical Museum, William Lindsey was a trustee of the Ben Thompson Academy. Another source, a century-old Carroll newspaper discussed below, stated that John attended and taught at the “Dr. Miles G Smith’s school on Pine Creek” at “old Oak Hill.”

Gary Marshall has Jesse listed as a probable son of Henry Lindsey Sr. in his unpublished book on the Carroll County Lindseys. Dr. S. H. Landreth has also so identified Jesse in a pamphlet on the Lindsey family. Both Marshall and Landreth say that Jesse may have been known as John, at least in his earlier days. Landreth refers to Jesse’s second son as John Jr. Their assignment of Jesse as a possible son of Henry was made before I told them about the Wythe/Pulaski deeds of Jesse and William.

According to Alderman and Marshall, at least three members of the Carroll County Lindsey family married into the family of Stephen Mitchell. William married Martha Mitchell, Stephen’s daughter. Henry Lindsey’s son Stephen Lindsey married Ketturah Mitchell, another daughter of Stephen Mitchell. Henry’s son James’s son Richard Watson Lindsey married Sarah Victoria Mitchell, a granddaughter of Stephen Mitchell. According to the Randolph County Biographies, Jesse’s son John H. Lindsey married Margaret A. Mitchell, who was another granddaughter of Stephen Mitchell. According to Carroll County Marriage Register 1, John H. and Margaret resided in Carroll County and were married there on 27 Nov 1856.

Jesse named his first-born son William Lindsey, probably after the brother with which he was most associated. Another of Jesse’s sons, Stephen D., was probably named after his brother Stephen. Jesse’s brother James Lindsey named a son Jesse Pierce Lindsey. For further information on the children and grandchildren of Jesse Lindsey and Catherine Kelly see this three-generation chart.

Two recently re-discovered documents add proof of Jesse Lindsey’s connections to his siblings. One is a century-old Carroll County newspaper article which states that Jesse Lindsey was the brother of William Lindsey, the Carroll County court clerk. The other is a genealogy notebook kept by my grandmother, Emily Isabelle “Belle” Wheeler Hurst, with additions by her daughter Nannie Belle Hurst Gilbert Owen, in which it was stated that "Brothers of Jesse Lindsay were William, farmer [lawyer scratched out] in Hillsville, VA and Jimmy, a Campbellite preacher in Carroll Co." and "A sister, Leah Smith, a smart woman, had a daughter Lizzie who was a teacher." All those statements are corroborated by other independent evidence.

On the huge Internet site Ancestry World Tree/World Connect, I found two family trees which listed Henry Lindsey, with wife Elizabeth Smith, and parents William Lindsey and Mary Barksdale. On these identical sites (one probably a copy of the other), there are several siblings for Henry, including a Jesse Lindsey. If accurate, that would mean that our Jesse was named for an uncle. There is an entry on Ancestry.com, a subscription site, which lists a Jesse Lindsay born May 24, 1776 to William Lindsay and Mary Barksdale. A similar entry appears on the LDS FamilySearch site. The earlier Jesse married Leah Hurst (my second cousin, four times removed), the daughter of his stepfather Capt. John Hurst from an earlier marriage, in Greene County, Tennessee, on February 7, 1800. They later moved to Indiana.

For further proof of the connections between the first William Lindsey of Carroll County, his wife Mary Barksdale, her second husband Capt. John Hurst, and William’s grandson William Lindsey, based on traditional genealogy and DNA testing, see my discussion of the Hurst-Lindsey connections. Also see the Lindsay International DNA Project website, which demonstrates the close Y-chromosome DNA connection between a descendant of the first William Lindsey and Mary Barksdale and a descendant of Henry Lindsey Sr.’ son James.

In summary, there are many connections between Jesse Lindsey and the Carroll County Lindsey family. Jesse’s birth date falls logically in the list of Henry Lindsey’s other children. William Lindsey lived in Wythe County, was probably associated with Jesse’s wife’s family, and bought adjoining properties with Jesse from the same person on the same day. Jesse and William’s lands were only a few miles down Big Reed Island Creek from Henry Lindsey. Jesse’s son John H. Lindsey attended and taught school in Carroll and married into the same Carroll County Mitchell family which had three other marriages to the Lindsey family. Jesse named sons after his brothers William and Stephen. James Lindsey named a son Jesse P. Lindsey. Several Internet sites suggest that Jesse was named after his uncle. A century-old newspaper article connected Jesse to his brother William. Jesse’s granddaughter’s notebook identified two of his brothers and a sister. There should no longer be any question; Jesse Lindsey was the son of Henry Lindsey Sr. and Elizabeth Smith of Carroll County, Virginia.