ll32

LFGA Line 32.

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Line 32. Martin Laye, born 1710 in Pfalz, Germany arrived in Philadelphia, PA in 1741. He married Catherine Faust, daughter of Johan Phillip Faust in 1745 in Berks, PA. The children of the marriage were George, b. 1745, John, b. 1747, Mary, born 1749 and Henry, born 1750. The family moved to Orange County, NC around 1755. John Lay wed Mary Duffie Holt; George wed Catherine Tillman; Mary wed George Foust and Henry wed Margaret Tillman. John Lay's children included Henry II, b. 1777 who married Sophia Albright. Their son, John A. Lay, married Sarah "Sally"; Williams on 16 March, 1829 in Orange, NC.

CONTACTS

Antoinette Workman Vawter avawter1@email.msn.com

Oris Wilson

Linda M. Miles

Antoinette Vawter

Antoinette grew up in California, educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned her doctorate from Southern California Institute of Law. She is a member of the International Society of Astrological Research, certified by the American Federation of Astrologers, and she produced and presented a year long New Age series on local public radio.

Antoinette is an avid clay court tennis player, and genealogical researcher. She is a member of both the Alamance County, North Carolina and Crawford County, Illinois, Genealogical Societies.

Line 32

Alamance Lays

By Antoinette Vawter

In the middle of the eighteenth century, a family of Lays settled in Alamance, North Carolina; a county famous for the cloth to which it lent it's name, and for it's many fine potters. Alamance cloth is the familiar small brown, white, and blue cotton check that has been sold over the United States for two hundred years. The potters who are so well known are Lays.

The scion of the Alamance Lays was Martin Laye, emigre from Pfalz, Germany and of Protestant French origin. Layes took refuge in the Palatinate (between Mannheim and the Saar Basin) when persecuted under Charles IX and Henry III despite the Catholic-Protestant peace accord signed in 1570 at St. Germanine en Laye.

Martin and his wife, Catherine Faust Laye, sailed into Philadelphia Harbor on the St. Mark, 26 September 1741. The couple settled in Philadelphia and began a family with son George, born in 1745, John born in 1747, and later, Mary and Henry, who came in 1750. Martin's mid-life impetus, shall we say, was to pack up and move to North Carolina.

What is now Alamance County, was in 1755 part of Orange County; when Martin began buying acreage there. His four children married there, and inherited his land and effects when Martin's health failed.

He sickened in 1777 and made out his testament, which was proven in Equity Court in May of 1779. Some parcels devolved to John and George as pre-death deed overs.

Martin's sons and daughter remained in Alamance, although George's widow Catherine Tillman Lay, pioneered on the frontier, leaving North Carolina for Tennessee after his death in 1799. John Lay married Mary Duffie Holt. Henry and his wife , Margaret begat Mary, John Henry, Daniel, and Elizabeth Lay.

Through the 1767 marriage of John Lay and Mary Holt Lay, come the line of potters that began with their grandsons: Joseph, Jeremiah, John III, Soloman II, plus some of the children of Henry Lay II and Susan Albright, who wed in 1796.

Most of the Alamance County Lays reside near Albright, North Carolina, the town that bears her name. Two of the Lay potters strayed into adjoining Person County...Joseph A., and his son George, and John M. Lay.

A fact well known to the people of Alamance, and carefully preserved by its genealogists, is that the Laye/Lays struggled early on for correct pronunciation of their name. Using the umlaut

(two dots over a vowel) proved unhelpful, and many Alamance Lays gave up and went to the spelling Loy which approximated the sound of their names.

The word Laye, derived about 1357 from the Dutch ;Laeye survives in modern French, and means case, chest, coffre (housing for the pipes and air magazine of the organ).

My own Lay, who kept the spelling Lay is Sophia II. She married George Patterson Payne and bore William Haywood, born 1853; Henry, Michael, John, Pearl, Betty; and my great-grandfather, Sterling Rushing Payne, who was born 25 March, 1859. Sophia died at Albright in 1897.

Sources: Larousse Arts, Sciences, Letters; Le PetitRobert; North Carolina WillBook; Orange County LandGrants and SurnameCatalogue; Federal Censusesfor 1790-1850, NorthCarolina. Know your Family, the Sharps, by Genevieve Peters; Lay Family Genealogy by J. Gilbert Lay; Index of North Carolina Potters; LDS Ancestral File and IGI, (for Confirmation only).

Lay of the Land June 1996

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