The five-family chart for one of my Ohio ancestor-researcher cousins showed Thomas Worthington Sanders' parents as Thomas Moorman Sanders and Sarah Ham Sanders. No less than 14 family trees on Ancestry.com did the same. In fact, my tree did for a while too. I labeled it "group think" in genealogy.
My latest hypothesis was that it was actually John Sanders and Emily Jones Sanders that were TW's parents. I'm gaining pretty good support for that with a preponderance of evidence.
Item 1. Nearly every researcher puts the date 22 Aug 1840 as the birth date for Thomas W. Sanders. Yet, the Quaker church records for Thomas and Sarah Sanders don't show a son that year by that name.
Item 2. W.T. Sanders was in the 1850 Census with John Sanders and Emily Jones Sanders.
Item 3. Thomas Sanders was in the 1860 Census with them too and a sister, Martha.
Item 4. Thomas W. Sanders married Nancy Leaverton in 1863.
Item 5. The 1870 Census had Thomas W. Sanders and his wife, Nancy, living with Martha Kerns, the married name of the daughter of John and Emily Sanders.
Item 6. Another researcher reports possessing a family bible record, the "Cunningham Bible" that she says matches the birth date of Winfrey T. Sanders to 22 Aug 1840.
Item 7. The funeral home's 1899 burial record for my third great grandfather at the cemetery in Washington Court House, Ohio matches his birth year 1840 too.
Item 8. No son named Thomas of Thomas and Sarah Ham Sanders ever shows up anywhere else. No other Winfrey or W.T. shows up either.
Item 9. A researcher with thirty years experience and a professional genealogy pedigree told me that, indeed, she believes Thomas W. Sanders was the son of John and Emily Sanders.
Item 10. An obit from the September 1899 edition of The News-Herald matches "my" Thomas W. Sanders with the birth date of Item 1, the spouse in Item 4, and the funeral in Item 7.
These add up for me.
So, though Winfrey Thomas Sanders becoming Thomas Worthington Sanders can be a bit confusing and may never get proven without a shadow of a doubt, a preponderance of evidence points to it being the case.
Mystery solved? I say yes.
So, now who are the parents of John Sanders?
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UPDATE: Item 10 was added in December 2013 to this updated column. The obit really brings closure to this mystery.
Plus, I'm now unconvinced that Thomas Worthington Sanders has the Worthington name at all anyway. I have yet to find a single government document, news article, bible record, Census, or anything considered a primary or secondary source of proof that uses that name. It's a new quest to remove use of it everywhere I can.
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