upload image

Where did William Layton and Violet Lawton come from

Privacy Level: Open (White)
Date: 1630 to 1630
Location: Middletown Village, Monmouth, New Jerseymap
Surnames/tags: Layton, Lawton, Almond, Almy, Blackman Rhode_Island, New_Jersey, Bedfordshire
Profile manager: Pauline Layton private message [send private message]
This page has been accessed 109 times.

Speculations about William Laiton's and his wife's actual identities.

Contents

WORK IN PROGRESS

ATTENTION

The underlying assumptions for the sections in this Free Space may have been rendered irrelevant by new discoveries in the YDNA field.

Please visit William Layton-9 for an update.

This Free Space will soon undergo an inspection to see which old theories need to be written up differently or even removed from consideration. -- P. L., 25 Jul 2024.


Where did William Layton and Violet Lawton come from?

(Lately AncestryDNA.com has been pushing William Almond Lawton as the true identity of the William Laiton (WikiTree Layton-9) who was granted land in Middletown, Monmouth Co., East Jersey in 1667. For somewhat longer there's been a rumor that his wife was Violet Blackman.)"

Who was William Almond Layton?

In England, "the Baptists, one of the few strong underground churches before 1640, spread widely via the army." [1] The message that Salvation came through God's Grace and not through your own Good Works was catching on, pulling converts out of the Puritan ranks (where the theory of Grace was anathema). A bit slower to catch on than the Baptist church was the Religious Society of Friends, which gained momentum in the 1650's. Also it gained a new name, because adherents were supposed to "quake at the Word of the Lord." [2]

William Almy and his wife Audrey were Friends, at heart if not yet openly. "In England the name was written Almy, in Wales, Almond." [3] It isn't clear why on the passenger list for the ship Abigail in 1635, William and his wife "Awdrey" used "Almond" while the children were listed as "Almy" and "Almie." Perhaps they were trying to hide the relationship. [4]

The Almonds/Almys arrived from England in Massachusetts Bay Colony but couldn't settled down properly there. In 1637 they moved from Sagus [5] to the slightly more welcoming new settlement of Sandwich, but Sandwich was under Puritan rule and was not yet the Quaker stronghold it would become in later years. [6] [7] In 1741 the family escaped the Puritans altogether and moved to Rhode Island where in 1636 Roger Williams had founded the first Baptist church in the Americas. [8] [9] At Portsmouth, William Almond was said to be an honest, trustworthy, dutiful public servant, [10] so that you might well name a son after him. If you liked Quakers.

The Portsmouth, Rhode Island Baptists considered themselves distinct from the Friends, but their numbers were few and they were tentatively happy to accept settlers who didn't demand everyone think alike. Meanwhile the Puritans in Massachusetts were becoming more closed-minded and were willing to punish outspoken disbelievers with flogging or death. [11] [12] When asked for help in the 1650's, the Rhode Islanders opened their gates to the persecuted Massachusetts Quakers. All too soon the Quakers started taking over, and the Reverend Obadiah Holmes and his Baptist followers laid plans to found a Baptist settlement in East Jersey. They could not like pacifistic people who wouldn't fire a musket in anger and couldn't be counted on in an Indian attack.

According to the theory that AncestryDNA.com seems to support, a William Almond Lawton was born in 1630, was brought up in Rhode Island, and was living in the newly settled Middletown in Monmouth County in East Jersey in the late 1660's. Here his name (without a middle name) appeared on the list of founders of a Baptist church (make a note of that). [13]

In other words, he grew up to be William Layton-9, of whom almost nothing is known before 1667. AncestryDNA.com's hints insist that William's parents were Thomas Lawton and his wife Elizabeth Salisbury (not Almond). So he doesn't descend from the Almond family but rather must be a Lawton who was named after William Almond. What are the chances of that?

Whoever came up with the idea that a William Almond Layton, born in 1630, was the son of Thomas Lawton-10 from Cranfield, Bedfordshire but died in Middletown, East Jersey in 1708 hadn't done their homework.

Listings of people in family trees in the various genealogy formats online often fail to mention their religion, or other helpful details like where they lived or when (or why) they moved. Without such information to act as a check or as corroboration, today's hopeful online amateur genealogist is likely to come up with wild and erroneous claims of who's related to whom. Delving in depth into online searches that include actual history books (or at least Wikipedia) can help you avoid this fault. There's a lot to be learned about these people. Just knowing the Lawtons were Baptists and the Almonds were Quakers should cause a raised eyebrow.

The Lawton brothers [14] had left England for Massachusetts in 1636, and in 1638 they were followers of Anne Hutchinson and went with her to Rhode Island. It's unlikely they would have met or admired William Almond while they were still in England, in time to name a son after him in 1630. The statement that sometimes appears, that Thomas and Elizabeth's son William Almond Lawton was born in Portsmouth, Rhode Island in 1630, is just impossible.

It gets worse. In 1630 Thomas (and his brother George) were not yet married, so proposing William's birthplace to be back in England (where there would be a parish record of it if a child was born at Lawton Hall), doesn't help.

The William Laiton who came to live in Middletown needs to have been born by about 1640 at the latest, calculating roughly from the need for his eldest son William to be born about 1660 (also calculated roughly). Even if we concede William Almond Layton to be born in about 1640 (by which time Thomas was having children in Portsmouth), William Almond didn't get there until 1641 and would surely have needed some time to establish himself as noteworthy.

William Laiton at Middletown seems to have been a good Baptist and unlikely to give himself a middle name that made him sound like a Quaker. None of the Middletown records show him using a middle name or initial. For that matter, none of the Rhode Island records of the time mention a William Layton or Lawton at all. The earliest William Lawton seems to be the one born 30 March 1707 in Little Compton, Newport County, Rhode Island. [15]

The earlier published accounts of the Lawton Hall Lawtons at Cranfield, Bedfordshire don't show them using the name William. They do appear to be a cadet branch of the Lawtons from near Church Lawton in Cheshire and those Lawtons did use the name William off and on, [16] but they don't seem to have produced a William Lawton who went to America at the right time to be William Laiton of Middletown (or to be his father, for that matter).

Elva Lawton wrote that "A search of the manorial lineage of Lawtons in Cheshire does not reveal any possible immigrant to New England." [17] She also reported a list of Cranfield records that shows Thomas Lawton's only child born there was his daughter Elizabeth, born in wedlock in 1637. [18]

William Shurtleff in "The Shurtleff and Lawton Families: Genealogy and History," published as recently as 2005, doesn't grant Thomas Lawton a son William. [19]

The earlier published books (back before the Internet made it too easy to post retroactive "facts" haphazardly) usually granted Thomas Lawton just five children, namely Daniel, Isaac, Elizabeth, Anne, and Sarah. None of them is a William. [20] The source of this information is likely to have been Thomas Lawton's own will, which he wrote on 5 June 1674. In it he names those very five children and no others. He doesn't even say he's cutting William Almond Lawton off with 5 shillings, the way he does daughter Anne. This will can be seen on Thomas Lawton-10's WikiTree profile page, and it supports a conclusion that William Almond Lawton (or just plain William) will never be convincingly found among Thomas Lawton-10's children. [21]

Names like Layton or Lawton can be found in 17th Century parish records in most English counties, and there were many Williams born in the 1630's and 1640's. Any of those might have become William Laiton of Middletown. Of special interest is William Lawton of Maulden, born in 1640 to Thomas Lawton and Mary Bruer (obviously not the Thomas Lawton born up at Lawton Hall; he'd already left for America by then). [22] Maulden is in Bedfordshire and not far from Cranfield, so this William might be a cousin of the Lawton Hall Lawtons. A cursory search didn't turn up proof he got married and settled down in England, which is helpful but hardly proof he went to America.

There's a crying need for some yDNA testing among the Layton and Lawton males to show if a connection from Middletown to Rhode Island to Bedfordshire to Cheshire holds true, thus ending the argument one way or the other. Unfortunately, my sparse branch of the Layton tree has completely run out of men. -- Pauline Layton, 2 June 2023

P.S. A gentle ramble through the Google results for Lawton in Portsmouth brought me to a Wikipedia page [23] that reveals how some imaginative genealogist could have been inspired to think up "William Almond Lawton." The page for the Lawton–Almy–Hall Farm shows a photograph of an old house whose name invites the researcher to seek a connection between the Lawtons and the Almys. In fact, George Lawton didn't acquire the farm until 1648, and the Almys don't enter the picture until Peleg Almy bought the farm from the Lawtons in 1832. But a search for Almy in Portsmouth was bound to turn up the William Almond who was contemporary with Thomas and George Lawton, and so a middle name was added to the myth that William Laiton of Middletown was one of those Lawtons from Rhode Island.

A visit to William Almy-6's WikiTree profile page will impress you with the extent of his public service but also with the great number of lawsuits he was involved in. He cannot have been universally admired or trusted as recent reports on William Almond seem to imply. Also, we see that he was regularly using the name Almy, so a child named after him would be William Almy Lawton. Contemporaneously, "Almond" may only be found where his name appeared on the list (in England) of the Abigail's passengers, which can easily be seen online by today's hopeful genealogists, but it wouldn't have been available then to Lawtons wondering what to name a son. "Almond" sounds much more patrician and makes a grand middle name that allays suspicion the first time you hear it. "At last," I thought, "Ancestry.com has done it; they've found out who William Laiton was!" No; really not. -- Pauline Layton, 2 June 2023

P.P.S. I'd be delighted to connect our William (Laiton) Layton-9 with the Rhode Island Lawtons if there were a clearcut way to do it, but every time I look closer I see what looks like creative genealogy. Of course, if someone actually does have something that looks like proof of William Almond Layton's existence, I'd love to hear about it. -- Pauline Layton, 2 June 2023

The Rhode Island Lawtons

(This was formerly a research note attached to William Layton-9's profile page in 2021. It's slightly updated, 3 June 2023.)

William Layton may be the son of Thomas Lawton of Portsmouth, Rhode Island and his wife Elizabeth Salisbury[24][25] Research needed. (10 May 2017)

Surviving Rhode Island records found online in the early 2000's by Pauline Layton do not include a William Layton/Lawton (or father and son pair of William Laytons).

The Lawtons who came from Cranfield, Bedfordshire to Rhode Island are well documented (in England), and in that bunch THERE IS NO WILLIAM LAWTON. [26] We often see amateur Layton attempts to insert William of Monmouth County into that (George's) Lawton family retroactively, or into the family of son Thomas. On the other hand, the modern R. I. Lawton descendants don't recognize or normally even bother discussing a proposed sibling or son William who moved away to New Jersey in about 1667. It is only some Layton descendants of William L. of Monmouth County who insist on this connection to Rhode Island and to Cranfield, convinced by early history books which lumped William L. in with the settlers from Rhode Island. (There are still other books which claim he was Scottish.)

Of interest is that the Rhode Island Lawton family used a family seal with a "demi-fox salient" [27] that is a degraded form of the coat of arms (with a "demi-wolf rampant") of the Lawton family of Lawton Hall at Church-Lawton, Cheshire, England. [28] This suggests the Bedfordshire Lawtons could be a cadet branch of the Cheshire Lawtons whose Y-dna goes back to Thomas de Davenport, who changed his name to match his wife's and become a Lauton, back around the year 1300. The Cheshire Lawtons were squires who were named after their property which was mentioned in the Domesday Book as Lautune, a township. [29] Unlike the Bedfordshire Lawtons, the Cheshire Lawtons often used the name William; however there is not a William recorded in the main line who could have gone to America at the right time in the 17th Century. [30]

Thus William Layton of Monmouth County was surely not born in state in Lawton Hall, Cheshire or Lawton Hall, Bedfordshire. We can't rule out the possibility that William Layton descended from a younger son. Someone with good access to Cheshire or Bedfordshire parish birth records might be able to find him; however, if this were doable it would probably have been done already.

Twenty years ago there were websites for two different ancient houses, Lawton Hall in Cheshire and Layton Hall in Shropshire, both claiming William L of Monmouth Co. as their descendant (but without explaining HOW he's related) and both urging their American cousins to send money to preserve their ancestral home. -P.L., 1 Feb 2021

The Barbados Connection -- Violetta Blackman

On the WikiTree profile of Violetta Blackman-6 there's a Research Note by Heather Husted that reports the existence of a Violetta Blackman "of Barbados," on record as having (along with her presumed sister Mary Ann) acquired a guardian in 1697. It's not clear how or if she was connected to the Monmouth colony, or if she ever came to Middletown in person.

The name Violet being extremely rare in English circles in the 17th Century, our modern genealogists seized on Miss Blackman as being the mystery lady who is known to history only as Violet Lawton, the executrix of William Lawton's will. Presumably she was William's wife, although the will doesn't name her as such or call her the mother of William's children. If Violetta had moved quickly from having a guardian in Barbados to being the wife of a 60- to 70-year-old farmer in East Jersey with mostly grown children, she could have been called Violet Lawton when William wrote his will in 1702. She barely had time to be the mother of William's last two children, John and Andrew, who are mentioned in the will and receive special treatment.

So far, documentation to support this theory has not emerged. Is it likely? Are there other possibilities?

Another Violet our modern online genealogists are enthused about is Violet Wilson, born 22 July 1640 in Edinburgh, Scotland, to James Wilson and his wife Catherine Jarden. [31] I'm not aware why Violet Wilson should be considered more likely to be William Lawton's wife than any of the other Scottish Violets alive at the time. I hope someone else can provide enlightenment about this.

My favorite theory is that Violet was William's second wife and she arrived in East Jersey in 1685 on the Scottish prison ship, the Henry&Francis. She served as an indentured servant for four years until she was grown up, then she married William Lawton (Laiton) (Layton) and could have given birth to John and Andrew during the 1690's. But this is purely fantasy as yet, supported only by the fact that Violet and Andrew were mainly Scottish names, and rare in Middletown before that time. -- Pauline Layton, 5 June 2023)

The Barbados Connection -- William Laydon

John Hotten's collected immigration records include "Wm. Laydon," age seventeen, amid many other men and women on the Ann and Elizabeth on 27 April 1635, traveling from London to "the Barbadoes and St. Christophers." [32] They had taken "oaths of allegeance and supremacie" and submitted to the Church of England (for all the good that did).

So here we have a presumably able-bodied young man, going forth to seek his fortune in one of the few places on Earth where he might possibly marry a Violet in that century. That is, assuming that Violetta Blackman's name may have been handed down from an earlier Violet on the island. Such a Violet was almost certainly Scottish, and if William married her that early (or say by 1659) she could turn out to have been his one and only wife and the mother of all his children. In that case, John's and Andrew's birthdates could go back another decade, into the 1680's.

If William Laydon is indeed William Laiton of Middletown, he must have good luck seeking his fortune, so that he was able to afford to buy into the new settlement at Middletown in 1667. He could have become a Baptist while in Barbados, and the rest is history. Using the Lawton spelling for his name in his will could be just another random variant in the many spellings that people tried.

This is an encouraging theory, but it needs input from people familiar with how to handle records from Barbados. And Scotland. -- Pauline Layton, 5 June 2023)

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Kenneth O. Morgan, ed. The Oxford History of Britain, 1988, page 392.
  2. ↑ George Fox, Autobiography of George Fox, see chapter IV (A Year in Derby Jail, 1650-1651.)
  3. ↑ Charles Kingsbury Miller, Compiler, "Historic families of America. William Almy of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, 1630, Joris Janssen de Rapaljé, of Fort Orange (Albany), New Amsterdam and Brooklyn, 1623," 1897, p. 75.
  4. ↑ John Camden Hotten, ed. "The Original lists of persons of quality, emigrants, religious exiles, ... who went from Great Britain to the American plantations, 1600-1700 ...." London, 1874, page 93.
  5. ↑ Charles Kingsbury Miller, op. cit. pp. 12-13
  6. ↑ Note that Edmond Freeman, the founder of Sandwich, had been a fellow passenger on the Abigail. See Hotten, loc. cit.
  7. ↑ Jonathan A. Shaw, A Brief History of Sandwich, in https://sandwichhistory.org/history/
  8. ↑ Charles Kingsbury Miller, op. cit. p. 13
  9. ↑ footnote pending
  10. ↑ Charles Kingsbury Miller, op. cit. p. 14
  11. ↑ Richard P. Hallowell, "The Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts," New York, 1883. p. 35 ff, p. 110 ff, p. 183
  12. ↑ or see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Quakers
  13. ↑ Franklin Ellis, History of Monmouth, 1885, pages 526-527
  14. ↑ See the WikiTree profiles of Thomas Lawton-10 and George Lawton-11 for information and sources pertaining to the Lawton brothers of Bedfordshire and Rhode Island.
  15. ↑ William Shurtleff, "The Shurtleff and Lawton Families: Genealogy and History," Pine Hill Press, 2005. See "The First Lawtons in America."
  16. ↑ Elva Lawton, The descendants of Thomas Lawton of Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Lawton (privately published), New York, 1949. pp. iii-vii.
  17. ↑ Elva Lawton, op. cit. p. vii.
  18. ↑ Elva Lawton, op. cit. p. x.
  19. ↑ William Shurtleff, op. cit. p. 74
  20. ↑ Rebecca, who married son Daniel, is sometimes mistaken for a sixth child.
  21. ↑ It would be harder to debunk a son William named after Thomas Lawton's "loving friend William Wodell" mentioned in Thomas' will, but the will itself reveals he ran out of sons, so William Wodell was out of luck.
  22. ↑ International Genealogical Index (IGI), British parish registers on microfiche cards, compiled by the Church of Latter-day Saints, first published in 1973. Accessed at Olin Library at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1998.
  23. ↑ See Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawton%E2%80%93Almy%E2%80%93Hall_Farm
  24. ↑ http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/21855460/person/18002280029
  25. ↑ http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/21855460/person/18002289388/mediax/1?pgnum=1&pg=0&pgpl=pid|pgNum
  26. ↑ See Dr. Elva Lawton, op. cit. pages ix, x. She was searching the Cranfield parish records.
  27. ↑ Matthew Frederick Lawton's "The Realm of Lawton" webpage at http://www.realmoflawton.net/ is useful. In 2018 this included information about the Rhode Island Lawton family seal with the demi-fox. Now in 2021 they seem to have accepted the "fox" is really the Cheshire Lawtons' "wolf" and they use the whole Cheshire coat of arms. The seal is no longer discussed. They don't explain how Lawtons came from Cheshire to Bedfordshire, however. Also see George Lawton's profile page.
  28. ↑ The Cheshire Lawtons' pedigree and coat of arms is in George Ormerud's "The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, Vol. III," 1819. See https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924088434059&view=1up&seq=34.
  29. ↑ See Dr. Elva Lawton, op. cit., pages iv-v.
  30. ↑ Dr. Elva Lawton, op. cit. p. vii. She doesn't think any of the Lawtons of Lawton Hall in Cheshire made the trip to Rhode Island.
  31. ↑ This needs a good Scottish source! Help!
  32. ↑ John Hotten, op. cit. p. 70.

Sources





Collaboration
  • Login to edit this profile and add images.
  • Private Messages: Send a private message to the Profile Manager. (Best when privacy is an issue.)
  • Public Comments: Login to post. (Best for messages specifically directed to those editing this profile. Limit 20 per day.)


Comments: 1

Leave a message for others who see this profile.
There are no comments yet.
Login to post a comment.
Michael Cox
Might want to add "This Old Monmouth of Ours" by William Hornor (1932) to your research list.
posted by Michael Cox