An Earlier Arrival in Boone County

I have noted in earlier postings how several of the children of Robert Thomas Jones & Elizabeth Thornhill Jones (my fourth-great-grandparents) migrated from Jefferson County, Tennessee to Boone County, Indiana. Previously I understood that the migration occurred around the death of Elizabeth Thornhill Jones in February 1879. It now appears that at least two of the siblings, Martin Van Buren Jones and Sarah Melissa Jones Daniel (with her husband William Gilbert Daniel and their children), arrived in Boone County by 1872.

Ancestry.com has a searchable resource from Boone County called The People's Guide, A Business, Political and Religious Directory of Boone County, Indiana by Cline and McHaffie, dated 1874. The book is very useful, and provides a directory in Boone County of each township. Below is from page 201, in the directory for Sugar Creek Township:

This shows Martin Van Buren Jones, a farmer born in Tennessee in 1842, and that he settled in Boone County (4 miles northwest of Thorntown) in 1872. This also shows that he was a Democrat.

Nearby and also in Sugar Creek Township is an entry for William Gilbert Daniel, husband of Martin's sister Sarah Melissa Jones:

Joseph Thomas Jones does not appear in the directory, so it appears that he and family arrived in Boone County after 1874.

As a side note, I also found my third-great-grandfather, David Armstrong, in The People's Guide in Jefferson Township. I previously wrote about David's land in February, and a copy of the 1870 US Census entry for David appears in my writing on Easter Vail Armstrong.

As with the other finds, the entry on David Armstrong is very helpful, as I did not know he had settled in Boone County so early (he appears in the 1850 Census at the age of 15 in nearby Franklin Township, Montgomery County, Indiana with his parents John and Sarah Armstrong).

Another note - The People's Guide was found using Ancestry's Card Catalog feature. If you haven't tried this before, I recommend it as a way to find resources you might have overlooked. I filtered by USA, then by state (Indiana), and then county (Boone). Under Boone County, The People's Guide appears as a match from the Schools, Directories and Church Histories collection. I tried this for Montgomery County too, and have found other useful records, which will be featured in later posts.