James W. Thomlinson was born in 1866. His father was Joseph B Thomlinson, and his mother was probably
not Mary Meadows, who married Joseph B on 4 April 1870.
The family lived in Granby Township of Newton County, Missouri. In 1890 a James E (a typo?) Thomlinson married Mary A Phillips of Daviess county, Missouri. In 1900, James W and Mary were living in Granby township, with four children and Mary's father, Brice Phillips.
By 1910, they seem to have been divorced. James W was living with the James Stites family in Newton county, listed in the census as a brother in law, occupation lead miner. Mrs. Stites was a Mary, so, since the 1870 Census listed no Mary in Joseph B's household, this Mary was probably his half-sister, a daughter of Mary Meadows, James W's stepmother.
In that same year, Mary Thomlinson and her son Jesse (James W's youngest) were living in Mineral township, Jasper county, Missouri. I don't know where the other three children (young Joseph B, Dora and James Harrison, ages 18, 16 and 14) were.
Uncle Bruce remembers an Uncle George, a much younger half-brother of his father James Harrison, who came to stay with them in Iowa in the late 1930s. George was just a few years older than my father. This was a son of James W, by his second wife, Amy Smith.
The 1930 Census shows a George (11) and Myrtle (12) Thomlinson living in Jackson township, Daviess county, Missouri with W Drummond and wife Dora, listed as sister- and brother-in-law, (respectively!) of the head of the household. It seems that James W had at least two children after his divorce, and couldn't care for them. Daviess county is where Dora's mother Mary Phillips came from.
The 1920 Census shows a James Thomlinson married to Amy, with children Myrtle and George, living in Davies County, MO. From George's SS-5 form, we know that she was Amy Smith.
We still don't know what happened to James W between 1920 and 1930, or when it happened. Uncle Bruce said that he remembered meeting his grandfather (James W) briefly, while he was young, so that suggests that he survived into the late 1920s.
