The Joneses of Drombeg: the fuller record

The family's own record of Drombeg ran, until this month, one child per generation: a rope, not a tree. The Registry of Deeds, the Ross registers and a nephew's will have now done for the Joneses what the parish registers did for the Damerys, and the story starts with a correction at the very top.

Henry Jones, the founder, took his lease of Drombeg from the Hollow Sword Blades Company on 27 October 1708 and was buried at Ross in July 1743. The old record gave him a birth in 1703, which was almost certainly the family's arrival misremembered as a birthday, and, briefly, a wife: this research itself married him to Ann Lambley three weeks ago on the strength of a 1719 deed. The deed, read in full rather than in index, unmarried them. Memorial 13570 is the settlement of William Honners and Ann Lambley; Henry stood trustee, the steady friend holding the paperwork. The correction is written on both their pages, because a project that buries its wrong turns cannot be trusted on its right ones. Who the founder did marry is an open question: a Victorian clergyman says "Miss Townsend", without forename or source, and the only evidence for him is two grandsons carrying Townsend as a middle name. The question is entered as a question. What the week restored instead were his six daughters, recovered from the 1776 will of his nephew Alexander Martin: Catherine who married a Hungerford, Elizabeth a Harris, Frances a Beamish, Grace a Watkins, Mary, and a possible Jane, a whole generation of west Cork alliances the tree had forgotten.

His heir Edward Jones, Esquire, buried at Ross in 1774, styled his home in his will "Droumbegg, now Mount Pleasant"; his wife Ann Ellis was the eldest daughter of Rev. William Ellis of Clonakilty, their settlement dated October 1752. Five more of their children are now on the tree, among them a small William Ellis Jones who lived less than a year, and two sons baptised plain Edward and John who appear in their father's will as Edward Townsend Jones and John Townsend Jones, the middle name that keeps the founder's question alive.

Rev. Henry Jones, baptised at Ross in 1756 (the register corrects the old 1760: Trinity had him at fifteen), married Catherine Travers in 1782 and had ten children, all now recorded, from Alicia who married a Hungerford of Cahirmore to Frances-Jane who married her own first cousin. His grandson Rev. Richard Jones, DD, turns out to be a man this site already knew twice without knowing it: he is the clergyman assisting at his brother Harry's wedding at Glandore in 1861, and the "uncle of the bridegroom" who married Richard William Jones to Alice Blanche White at Blackrock in January 1901, weeks before his own sudden death at Youghal.

From there the printed book and this site tell one story: Harry of the 1852 Encumbered Estates sale, baptised at Rincurran in 1830, of age fourteen weeks before the auction; his wife Eliza Hester Smyth of the Downeen Castle Smyths; Richard William, farming Drombeg to his death in the house in 1944; and the picnics at the circle that outlived all the paperwork. The departure question, and what did or did not happen in 1923, is told in the Journal and stays open, keys named, in the family's best tradition of honest unfinished business.