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.

Surname Saturday - Olmstead

The Olmstead Family

This week's choice for a surname to feature was fairly easy since today's research on Ancestry.com has resulted in dozens of new additions to my family tree. This is especially enlightening since up until a few weeks ago, I had been researching the family using the spelling Almstead until I discovered  the "Genealogy of the Olmsted Family in America" - a book compiled by Henry King Olmsted in 1912. This resource came to me through a Google books search.

It was in this book that I found my great-great grandmother, Eliza Ann Olmstead and her husband, John Laymon. From this reference, I discovered her parents, Eben Andrews Olmstead, who was born in 1812 and Anne Archibald, who was born in 1817.

Many of the Olmstead family settled in Illinois and thanks to the Illinois Statewide Marriage Index 1763 - 1900, I found even more Olmstead marriages - and confirmation of the information in the Henry King Olmsted book. If you have any ancestors who lived in Illinois during this time frame, I highly recommend the marriage search on that site.

According to Ancestry.com, the majority of Olmstead families in the United States in 1940 lived in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, with some in Indiana and Illinois, which would have been my line of Olmsteads. By 1880, the name concentration was heaviest in New York and Michigan and still a large number in Illinois and many having moved further west to Iowa. By 1920, there were Olmsteads in all of the states except Wyoming and Nevada.

While this newly discovered family line offers a wealth of new information, I'm looking forward to tracing the lineage of my great great great grandparents, Eben Omstead and Anne Archibald, back another generation, as well as documenting their descendants as close to present day as I can. It's always exciting to find those new branches of the family tree.

The headstone of John Laymon and Eliza Ann Olmstead is located in Hardy Cemetery, Hardy, Nuckolls county, Nebraska.


The Olmstead Name in History