The Laytons and Religion and DNA

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: United States
Surname/tag: Layton Leighton Laton

The Laytons and Religion and DNA

Oftentimes the religious preferences of Laytons in America can serve as a guide to which line of Laytons they belong to. Paying attention to where people were baptized or married or buried can help solve a mystery. YDNA may be used to confirm preliminary conclusions, if not now, soon. YDNA has not yet been discovered for all the Layton lines, but the day will come.

Find-A-Grave memorials, by naming a cemetery, will often give you a clue to what religious sect a family belongs to.

Note that "Reformed" in a church or cemetery title usually is a shortened version of "Reformed Dutch."

• Descendants of William Layton-9 (of Middletown, New Jersey), at least until the most recent generations, have tended to be Baptists. Later they sometimes became Methodists.

(Although Abraham Layton-98 is buried in a Methodist churchyard in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, at the time it was probably the site of a Baptist meetinghouse.)

(John Layton-851's father, William Layton (1758-1838) of Decatur, Indiana, when he was turning old and suddenly got religion, became a Baptist.)

• Descendants of Jan Laton-51 of Long Island would of course attend the Dutch Reformed Church, which looked for leadership to Albany, New York. The Reformed Church at Bedminster, New Jersey has many Laytons with Anglicized names buried in its churchyard.

• Descendants of Silas Layton-2156 tend to be Roman Catholics, which encourages the notion that they might have come from Ireland instead of Yorkshire, England, as is sometimes claimed. Many of Silas Layton's descendants were given really uncommon names: Chrystostom, Ignatius, Hilarion, Silverius, etc. If you find an oddly named Layton, look for Silas in the family tree. Mercifully, some of these were just middle names. Some, maybe all, were names of Catholic saints.

• Descendants of Scottish Covenanters and French Huguenots came to settle in Middlesex County, New Jersey. Later, some moved on to Morris County, to the Passaic River Valley and to the southern part of the county, where they built a Presbyterian church at Morristown. Some would soon come further south, into northern Somerset County, where they would build Presbyterian churches at Basking Ridge and Liberty Corner.

(Among the early settlers at Piscataway, Middlesex County, New Jersey, may have been Leightons or Laytons who descended from Thomas Leighton-288 of Dover, New Hampshire, the "Pioneer of Piscataqua." So when in Morris County you find Presbyterian Heaths and Runyans and Allens intermarrying with apparently equally Presbyterian Laytons, it raises a question where those Laytons came from. John Stillwell, in Volume V of his set of books, "Historical and Genealogical Miscellany," thought that the John Layton-1235 who married Anne Runyon-761 and lived at Long Hill in southern Morris County was a grandson of William Layton-9. That John would have been raised as a Baptist. Is Stillwell wrong?

(YDNA could be an easy way to tell. According to the information now available in FamilyTreeDNA Classic Charts, descendants of Thomas Leighton-288 belong to haplogroup R-I253. If male linear descendants of John Layton and wife Anne Runyan could be tested, it could show if they belong to R-I253, too, which would mean Stillwell is probably wrong. As of now, the tendency is for presumed linear male descendants of William Layton-9 of Middletown to belong to haplogroup R-M269 (R-M343 and R-P25 mean roughly the same thing), which is quite different from R-I253.) -- Pauline Layton, 10 Nov 2023.

Sources

• Stillwell, John Edwin, M.D. Historical and genealogical miscellany : data relating to the settlement and settlers of New York and New Jersey, Vol. V, 1903 (reissued 1932) https://archive.org/details/historicalgeneal05instil/page/n5