Day 43 -- Rocky Fork Lake to Portsmouth, Ohio -- 116 Miles

Our sole purpose today was to travel further south in the state of Ohio until we came to the town of Rome. Rome is situated, at least on old maps, right on the north bank of the mighty Ohio River and was the closest town I could find to where my Jones ancestors might have lived after the War of 1812.

Actually, the Jones family might actually have moved to Ohio slightly sooner than 1812, but since my great, great-grandfather, John Heath Preston Jones, was born in 1811 in Louisville, Kentucky, and not in Ohio, the timing would have been pretty close to the outbreak of the war.

I'm making a few presumptions here as the only concrete piece of data I possess is the birth of John Jones in Louisville. I don't know who he considered his father and mother. I don't know who his siblings were for sure. There just isn't any information that I have been able to turn up that even hazards a guess about these things.

However, using my own deductive reasoning, I decided that the father of John Heath Preston Jones is a man who seems to have lived in the state of Kentucky around the right year, and also seems to have been married around the right year to make the birth of JHP Jones occur in 1811. This man was named Price Jones and may have been the son of one John Jones who also lived in Kentucky for a time.

One of the clues I used to suggest Price as John's father is the standard "naming convention" of the day that decreed that the father's first born son be named after his father. Checking the record, we see that John Heath Preston Jones' first born son was indeed called "Price."

Since census documents before 1850 do not name everyone in the household, I am unable to verify that JHP Jones is living with Price Jones in Ohio after 1811. But Price is certainly living in Green Township, Adams County, Ohio by the time of the 1830 census, and a host of other Jones family members are listed separately there also. I believe all the other Jones family members are brothers of Price. Their names are Noah, Milton, Ephraim, William, and James.

The most telling piece of evidence that I have found is that John Heath Preston Jones is living in the same neighborhood as Price and the other Jones family members in 1840, just after he marries Julia Ann Adams. He's going by the name Preston Jones at the time.

I didn't quite have enough time to pound this out this evening since I spent so much time sitting and enjoying the vista of the Ohio River just a hundred or so feet from our camp. Will add more later.