As anyone who's researched Clayton history over the years can tell you, there are a lot of tangled branches to sort through. This particular branch begins with the Claytons of Clayton-le-Moors in Lancashire around the year 1066. From there, the line moves to John de Clayton's Clayton Hall in Yorkshire before making its way down to Sussex, stopping to obtain a few advanced degrees from Cambridge along the way.Incentives from the British Crown bring these Claytons to the Colonial Province of Virginia in the 1540s, and shortly thereafter, they follow the burgeoning tobacco industry into the Province of Carolina before seeking vast acres of fertile land in Kentucky. When tobacco moves north after the Civil War, they follow the lumber boom into Missouri.This booklet was created for my family using nearly 70 sources, scattered from 1666 to the present, all contained within the Bibliography in the back. It's as researched, sourced, and accurate as I'm capable of making it. That said, understand that I'm not a genealogist, and this is not meant to be a scholarly work. My hope is that readers find information to help them untangle their own branches, and if in that process they find new twigs and leaves I may have overlooked, that's even better.

Family history and genealogical information about the descendants of Charles Collier Clayton who was born ca. 1781 in Charlotte Co., Virginia. He married Nancy Toney ca. 1800. They lived in South Carolina ca. 1800-1810, Tennessee ca. 1811-1849 and settled in the state of Mississippi ca. 1849. Charles and Mary were the parents of eight known children. Descendants lived in Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and elsewhere.

The William Clayton family immigrated from England to Pennsylvania in 1671. William was a Quaker, a member of William Penn's Council, a Judge and a carpenter; he became Governor of Pennsylvania and died in 1689.