"Thoreau might readily have discovered, first of all, that he was a descendant in the sixth generation from Lewis and Anne Jones, the line being, Lewis, Josiah, Josiah, Elisha, to Mary, mother of Cynthia Dunbar. He might have discovered that Lydia Jones, the only daughter of Lewis and Anne Jones, to reach maturity, became the wife of Jonathan, son of John Whitney, the founder of this great family in Massachusetts...
        He might have discovered the interesting fact that the Jones family owed a quarter very largely to two remarkable women, Lydia Treadway, about whose ancestry there has been an interesting dispute, who became the wife of Captain Josiah Jones, son of Lewis and Anne, and Abigail Barnes, wife of the second Josiah, who bore his father's name, and succeeded him in the military and civic life of Weston. Lydia Treadway Jones, born 1649, lived to the age of ninety-four, dying in 1743, at which time she had 289 living descendants."

[SOURCE: The above is an excerpt from The Wide Spreading Jones Family: Thoreau, President Garfield and Mark Hopkins Among Its Famous Members - A Further Lifting of the Veil Only Slightly Raised by Frank Sanborn in His Life of the Concord Philosopher, by Edmund Hudson -- from Boston Evening Transcript, 27 June 1917 -- more of this article was posted at www.walden.org]

Other sources confirm he was elected Deacon but also add that he refused to accept the position. [Family Memorials. Genealogies of the Families and Descendants of the Early Settlers of Watertown, MA, including Waltham and Weston and Bond's Genealogists and History of Watertown]