By MICHAEL ZITZ

Tree rings might seem to be exciting only to termites.

But last night, they had Germanna Colonies descendents atwitter over the prospect that their ancestors may have had dealings with Daniel Boone and Thomas Jefferson and that Salubria may have influenced the design of Montpelier.

Salubria is the 18th-century Georgian-style house built by the widow of colonies founder Alexander Spotswood and her second husband. Now owned by the Germanna Foundation, it still stands off State Route 3 in Stevensburg, about 25 miles west of Fredericksburg.

Marc Wheat, president of the Germanna Foundation, said samples of lumber taken from Salubria were subjected to analysis by dendrochronology, a technique that uses patterns of tree rings to date wood with great precision.

By comparing Salubria's wood with a historical database, researchers determined that the home of the Rev. John Thompson of Little Fork Church and his wife, Lady Butler Brayne Spotswood Thompson, was built well after their marriage and as much as a decade earlier than most historians had thought.

Germanna Colonies descendents who gathered for their annual reunion this weekend learned that samples from the house matched those in the database from 1753 to 1756 and 1757. While the foundation had placed the house's construction in 1742, around the time of Lady Spotswood's marriage to Thompson, most historians believed it was built in the late 1760s.

The popular wisdom had been that Montpelier--the home James Madison built in neighboring Orange County in 1764--influenced the design of Salubria. But the scientific dating process for Salubria's lumber "places it before wood used in Montpelier," Wheat noted.

"Maybe Salubria was the influence to Montpelier," he said.

Wheat expects the results of the study to lead to discussions with Montpelier officials and with scholars who study architecture of that early era in American history.

Wheat said the new information also provides hints at possible connections with other well-known figures of that time.