Walter James Jones was born in 1894 in Dunn Loring to James Walter Jones, a government clerk, and his wife, Mary Riedel, according to census, draft, and marriage records. Walter was the fourth of his parents’ six children. In 1901, his father bought a property in the vicinity of the northeast corner of Beulah Road’s intersection with Old Courthouse Road, according to Fairfax County property records, placing the family in the area of the Clarke School. Walter’s attendance at the school is confirmed by the Fairfax Herald in late 1906 when he was 11; he made the honor roll at Clarke.
After his time at the Clarke School, Walter attended three years of high school, according to the 1940 census. When he registered for the WWI draft in 1917, he described himself as tall and slender with brown hair. At the time, his occupation was as a forest guard for the U.S. Forest Service in what was then the Crook National Forest in southeastern Arizona. His home address remained in Vienna, however.
Tuberculosis probably drove Walter to Arizona. On his draft registration, he claimed exemption because of tuberculosis, and in the WWI era, Arizona was a haven for tuberculosis sufferers, judging from information from the Pima County Public Library.
As of 1920, Walter was working as a bookkeeper in Yavapai County in central Arizona. For the rest of his life, Walter lived in Yavapai County, according to his obituary. In 1920, he married Rose Mae Pavlista in Phoenix. The couple do not appear to have had children.
On Walter’s marriage certificate as well as his 1917 draft registration, he identified himself as James Walter Jones. Thereafter, he continued this practice of reversing the order of his first and middle names from how they had appeared in a Virginia birth registry and in census records from 1900 and 1910.
By 1929, Walter was working as photographer, according to a Prescott, Arizona phone directory. The 1930 census indicated that he was self-employed as a photographer, which also was the occupation recorded on his death certificate more than three decades later. Illness appears to have disrupted his ability to work, however. In the 1940 census, no occupation is listed for Walter, and as of the 1950 census, he was “permanently ill” and unable to work.
In 1966, Walter James Jones died in Prescott of anemia and arteriosclerosis, according to his death certificate. He is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Phoenix, many, many miles from where he grew up and went to school in the Vienna area.