Unmarrying the founder

Three weeks ago this research married Henry Jones, the founder of the Drombeg line, to Ann Lambley, daughter of an alderman of Cork, on the strength of a 1719 deed. This week the same deed, read in full rather than in index, took the marriage back. Memorial 13570 is the marriage settlement of William Honners and Ann Lambley; Henry Jones of Drombeg appears in it as the trustee, the steady friend holding the paperwork, not the bridegroom. The tree has been corrected, and the correction is recorded on both their pages, because a research project that quietly buries its own wrong turns cannot be trusted on its right ones.

So who did the founder marry? The honest answer is that nobody knows. A Victorian clergyman-historian says "Miss Townsend", with no forename and no source, and there are reasons to half-believe him: two of Henry's grandsons carried Townsend as a middle name. There are also reasons to doubt: no marriage bond survives, and the Townsends' own records know nothing of it. And there is a wrinkle worth savouring: Brady published his claim in the early 1860s, and within a few years two of the Drombeg Joneses really did marry Townsends, which is exactly how a guess gets remembered as a fact. The question stays open, and is entered on Henry's page as a question.

What the week gave back with the other hand is a family. The tree had carried the founder's line as one child per generation, a rope rather than a tree. A nephew's will of 1776, cross-checked against the marriage licence bonds, has now restored Henry's six daughters: Catherine who married a Hungerford, Elizabeth who married a Harris, Frances who married a Beamish, Mary, Grace who married a Watkins, and a possible Jane. The next generation gained five more children, among them a small William Ellis Jones who lived less than a year, and the one after gained nine, including Rev. Richard Jones, who turns out to be the uncle who officiated at both the weddings this site already knew: his brother Harry's at Glandore in 1861, and Richard William's at Blackrock in 1901, weeks before his own death. The register even fixed the founder's dates: the old birth year of 1703 was almost certainly the family's arrival at Drombeg misremembered as a birthday.

None of this is in the printed book, which went to the family before the deed was read. That is now the standing arrangement: the book is the 2026 edition, fixed in print; the tree and the Journal keep moving. If you are descended from a Hungerford, a Harris, a Beamish or a Watkins of west Cork, you may be more of a cousin than either of us knew: do write.