Descendants of John R. Balch - Howard Stone Baulch Family

evidence to support that nor any evidence of Baulches in Germany. The similar name in Germany is
Bolich.
The following information is transcribed from a letter by family researcher, Jessie Nimmo Hunter, passed
from James Homer Baulch to Howard Stone Baulch, regarding the spelling of Baulch and from where John
R. Balch may have come:
"All of Grandpa's [William Nicholas Baulch's] records in Sumner County (deeds to land, etc.), the name
was spelled B A L C H. You may recall that Uncle Alfred spelled his name 'Balch.' We thought, of course,
that he was the one who was 'out of step.' Also, all my references were for this spelling. I am positive
that, though I've never found why, Grandpa changed it about 1830 and the original spelling is correct. ...
Since the only folk story repeated about the Balch family was that the John Balch who came to Sumner
County when he had run away from home was that his sister had lost her wedding dress when crossing
the Green River. I thought this would be easy [to research] but that river crosses up and down and across
Kentucky from one end to the other."
D La Pierre Ballard (a fourth cousin, a fifth cousin, a double fifth cousin, twice a double fourth cousin once
removed, and a quadruple fifth cousin of Howard Stone Baulch), who has done much research and
gathered much information on the Stone and Baulch families, offers this perspective on the Baulch name:
"Before 1850 names were as they were pronounced and any reasonable spelling was all right.
Undoubtedly, Balch was the original, but Baulch was adopted to keep the 'ah' or 'au' sound rather than to
let the 'a' go to the 'a' as in apple. My name Ballard did not have its spelling changed because the 'a' as in
apple did not make it awkward to say. The early pronunciation of Ballard had the 'a' as in ball. You can see
this if you see the movie, 'Mrs. Miniver', incidentally. In England, Ballard has the 'a' as in ball rather than
the 'a' as in apple as it does here in America. The 'au' in Baulch is pronounced as the 'au' as in author."
A potential father of John R. Balch could be John Baulch who served in the War of 1812 in Allison's
Regiment of the East Tennessee Militia. No research has been done on his family.
Gene Edward Balch, a 12th generation descendant of John Balch (1631-1690) who settled in Lord
Baltimore's Maryland Colony in 1658, offers another possibility. Gene has researched the Balch family for
over thirty years. He believes "that John R. Balch may be one and the same as young John Balch, son of
William & Rebecca, of Sparta, Tennessee. This John Balch disappeared from the campsite during a trip
with his two brothers and his mother, in about 1827-1828." He could be correct, even though William &
Rebecca Balch of Sparta, Tennessee were born in Maryland and North Carolina, not in Scotland and
Ireland as John R. Balch reported for the 1880 Census. The coincidence of family legends is striking.
The Balch DNA project received results from Gene Balch's testing in November 2009, comparing the John
R. Balch line (Howard Baulch's DNA) with the Balch Family of Maryland. They matched on 37 markers, so
there is a Balch connection somewhere between these two family lines.
More About JOHN R. BALCH:
Name 2: John R. Baulch
Burial: Stone-Baulch Cemetery, Sumner, Tennessee, USA
Notes for SOPHIA STONE:
The Stone Family Ancestry compiled by Maxine Arnold Stone in 1972 indicates that there were nine
children borne by Sophia Stone; that data was incomplete as she had a total of 13 children.
More About SOPHIA STONE:
Burial: Stone-Baulch Cemetery, Sumner, Tennessee, USA
More About JOHN BALCH and SOPHIA STONE:
Marriage: 17 Jan 1833, Sumner, Tennessee, USA
Unknown-Ending: 22 May 2000, Found in Early Sumner County Marriage Records,
http://www.rootsweb.com/~tnsumner
Children of JOHN BALCH and SOPHIA STONE are:
2. i. MARY CATHERINE 3 BAULCH, b. 12 Jan 1833, Gallatin, Sumner, Tennessee, USA; d. 1914, Mineola, Wood,
Texas, USA.