According to the 1880 census, which was taken in June, a 23-year-old black man named John Dorsey was living on or next to property owned by James Tschiffely (age 36) and his wife Mary (age 44), off Seneca Road between the towns of Darnestown and Seneca. John Dorsey’s relationship to the head of house was listed as “servant,” and his occupation as “laborer,” meaning he was probably a farm hand employed by the Tschiffelys.1 According to James Tschiffely, John Diggs-Dorsey had been in his employ for five months, had said he was from the Damascus area of Montgomery County, and that he had been formerly enslaved by “Mr. King,” of King’s distillery. It is possible this explanation was a story Diggs-Dorsey told to his potential employer, in order to sound more like a local worker (a better prospect to hire), as opposed to an itinerant/migrant worker (a stranger) from Washington, D.C. Several papers suggested he  as from Washington, perhaps part of a group of workers coming up into the County from there, and, if this is accurate, the existence of the letter from a possible father living in Washington  later described) also supports this version of his place of origin. Alternately, some sources said he was from Port Tobacco, Maryland, or that his mother lived at Port Tobacco in Charles  County. John Diggs-Dorsey’s young age, as well as both the inconsistency and commonality of his name(s) make it difficult to verify his origins. James Tschiffely and Mary Malinda Lysle (who went by Linnie) had been married in the Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. in 1873.4 Linnie was originally from Pennsylvania, but had been living in Kentucky with her parents, William and Caroline Lysle, and two sisters until her father died in 1871. A few months after their wedding, a deed was executed in Linnie’s name for land in Montgomery County, not far from James’s father’s land.5 James was the son of Frederick A. Tschiffely, a wealthy government clerk from Washington, who had purchased land in Montgomery County before the Civil War.