The last note of a few days ago discussed Thomas Wayland and his descendants. Another family that is often confused with the Wayland family is the Wayman family. The two names are similar enough so that people do confuse the two. I have been known to be guilty of this and I often have to stop and think and fetch my memory aids (if I can remember where I put them). It was hard when the Blankenbakers held a picnic in the last half of the eighteenth century for there were Wayland and Wayman descendants of the early Blankenbakers.
George Wayman, whose name in Germany was Georg Caspar Weidmann, was one of the lucky people who survived the 1738 trip on the ship Oliver. The name became Wayman, though some people seem to be saying that it should not have been that in America if there was any attention at all to phonetics. George Wayman was probably a bachelor when he came, but he apparently married soon after arrival; his wife's name is unknown beyond Catherine. Though George started off farming in the Little Fork, three of his children married people from the Robinson River Valley, which might indicate that Catherine came from there also.
The children were Joseph, born about 1745, who lived all of his life in the Little Fork, where he married Ann Elizabeth Coons. Perhaps the second son was Henry Wayman, who married Magdalena Blankenbaker. He lived in the Robinson River Valley. Henry had two wives and the division of his children between the two wives is not entirely clear.
Harmon Wayman, perhaps the third son, lived near his brother Henry until about 1794. Harmon's first wife was Elizabeth Clore, the daughter of Peter Clore and his wife Barbara Yager. After Elizabeth Clore died, Harmon married Frances Clore, the daughter of John Clore.
Mary Wayman, daughter of George, married Adam Utz before 1776. These three sons and the daughter seem to be all of the children of George Wayman.
Anyone who is a descendant of George Wayman can feel lucky for the voyage of the ship Oliver (I believe it actually a bilander, a ship normally used in coastal trading) was a disaster with a great loss of life. When the ship left Rotterdam, the captain detected, in his opinion, that it was overloaded and he turned around and returned to Rotterdam where he resigned his position. The owners of the ship solved the problem by hiring another captain. Due to various delays, the people who boarded the ship in June were still on it the next January when it was off the coast of Virginia. It essentially sank there with a great loss of life. Of the original passengers, less than one-third of them survived.
(16 Aug 02)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.