Exceeding Expectations

Lancaster Valley of Pennsylvania and there had suffered the loss of his first wife. He came tothe mountains of North Carolina and Virginia to practice the trade of a charcoaler, the men whotransformed the seemingly limitless forests of the high country into charcoal to fuel the greatore furnaces and steam-driven railroads of the day.“People will notlook forward toposterity who neverlook backward totheir ancestors.”-Edmund BurkeWe first find a written record of William Wayne in North Carolina in the 1880 census, atwhich time he was married to Louisa Lyall, daughter of a well-known Wilkes County family. Itis believed that William Wayne may have been a Mennonite, a belief supported by the tall hatand beard he sported in a surviving photograph. Some Wayne family researchers believe thatWilliam Wayne’s parents were Thomas Abraham Wayne (1805 – 1886) and Mary Ann Jones(1821- 1905) of York County, Pennsylvania, although it seems their son William would have beenfour or five years younger than the birth date given to census takers by William M. Wayne.Twenty years earlier, in 1860, Louisa Lyall was about 2 years of age, living in the TownDistrict of Ashe County, North Carolina, with her parents, Hamilton and Bethany (Bethania)Patrick Lyall and her older sisters, Lois and Martha. Both dates and spelling were sometimesinexact in those days, and the family name was given as Lyles in that early census. In 1870,Louisa was living in Peak Creek Township, Ashe County, with Felix and Loretta Bare, next doorto her grandmother Elizabeth Lyall. Some Lyall family genealogists carry forward the traditionthat William Wayne and Louisa Lyall were married in the mid-1870s and that a son, christenedWilliam Wayne Jr., was born to them but died in infancy. No confirmation of that birth isavailable. Other researchers claim a marriage date for William and Louisa of February 21, 1878,and conclude that a little girl christened Margaret, but usually known as “Maggie,” was the firstchild born to the William Waynes on April 4, 1879. Little Maggie is found in the 1880 Census,living at home with her parents in Union Township, Wilkes County, North Carolina. Maggiemarried Nathan Wyatt, eventually moved to Winston-Salem, and died there on March 15, 1963.Their oldest surviving son, Jesse Everett Wayne, was born to William and Louisa Wayneon October 1, 1880 or1881, and came to young manhood in the hills and hollows of old WilkesCounty. Although the 1881 birth date is accepted by most Wayne genealogists, Jesse Waynegave his birth date as 1880 and his age as 37 when he registered in February 1918 for the WorldWar I draft.A younger sister joined the William Wayne family soon after the birth of Jesse Everett.In November 1970, The Times Recorder of Zanesville, Ohio, published an obituary for Lois L.Wyatt, recording her death on Thursday, November 26, 1970, at Bethesda Hospital, following a2 EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS