Keeping Up with the Joneses

Yesterday my brother Jon flew in, and we spent the afternoon hunting for the Jones family (my mother's maiden name). They lived in the Baltimore area for about 130 years before moving on to Ohio, then Pennsylvania, Illinois and Utah.

St. George's Parish,  in Hartford County, is where John Williams (William Jones' father-in-law) was born in 1709. It is now near Aberdeen Proving Ground. It had lots of old gravestones, but when they got into the 1700's they were pretty hard to read. The cemetery caretaker didn't seem to have any Williams on her list of plot owners.

Not too far from St. George's Parish we found the remains of Copley Parish in Joppa, Maryland. This is where William Jones was born in 1723. It was the original port city before Baltimore proved to have a better harbor. We met the minister who said that the early church was abandoned when everyone moved to Baltimore. They left the bodies in the graveyard, but took the tombstones with them. In the foreground is the outline of the first church, and in the back, left of the photo is the new church, built in a 1969.

They have some artifacts on display inside the church showing some of the history of Joppa. It appears our own relatives might have been a part of that dastardly headstone-stealing bunch, as the grandson,  Thomas Jones and his son James Naylor (who joined the LDS church), were both born in Baltimore. One of the original Copley Parish plots was owned by a man named Benjamin Jones--perhaps a relative!