John Laymon - a photograph helps locate 100 family members

John Laymon and Eliza Olmstead Laymon
at their home in Hardy, Nuckolls, Nebraska

In the last couple of weeks I've come across some old photographs, correspondence and other family history artifacts that had been tucked away and long forgotten since the late 1980s. Given my passion for genealogy, it's hard to believe that there were items I had not thoroughly perused, cataloged and committed to memory. I knew I had seen a photograph of my 2nd great grandparents, John Laymon and Eliza Olmstead, but hadn't come across it in years. The photograph was among the recently re-discovered family artifacts in my possession.

John and Eliza

John was a Union solider in the Civil War, a Private in the 91st Illinois Infantry. He was born in Indiana in 1838, sharing his birthday with our nation, July 4. I hadn't pursued my research on John Laymon beyond locating the index to the widow's pension that Eliza filed and some online information on the 91st Illinois Infantry.

A few days ago, I began working my tree on Ancestry.com to see what I might find. I knew the Laymon family had been in Grundy county, Illinois between 1855 - 1900 and later. Using online resources, including FindAGrave and Google Books, I came across some information about the Laymons of Grundy county.

As I am always cautious about the shaking leaves on Ancestry.com, I was quite hesitant to start adding these clues to my tree. I read the biographies of other Laymon men in the country history books I discovered on Google books. I looked through dozens of census records on Ancestry and FamilySearch.org. I looked at every census record for every Laymon in Grundy county during the time period when John Laymon lived there, and reconfirmed his marriage to Eliza on October 3, 1861 (thanks to the Illinois Statewide Marriage Index - a valuable resource).

It was not until I was able to put the pieces together that I concluded that my John Laymon was, indeed, the son of James Laymon and Maria Sloan. Not only that, but the county history gave me the names of all four of John's grandparents: Abraham Laymon and Elizabeth Goodpaster and George Sloan and Mary Storey. I discovered memorials and photographs of gravestones on FindAGrave for James Laymon, Maria Sloan Laymon, Abraham Laymon and Elizabeth Goodpaster. In a few short hours of online investigation, I was able to take this line back to my fourth great grandparents.

Once I was confident that my findings were solid, I started adding members to my Laymon tree on Ancestry. This was done strictly through census and public records - not by integrating other people's trees into mine. In a few more hours, I had added more than 100 people to my Laymon family tree. I am usually not one to be a relative collector or number counter, but in this situation, I found it incredible that I was able to go from knowing only a tiny bit of information about my Civil War ancestor into discovering more than 100 members of the family. And I haven't even begun to bring each branch of the family forward in time. That will be for another day.

Sometimes, all you need is a photograph to get the ball rolling.