Person:Jane Ramsey (8)

Possible Sibling of Jean (Ramsey) Gay

It is a possibility that Jean Ramsey, wife of John Gay, is a sister of William Ramsey, of the Calfpasture in Augusta County, based upon the following information from the Gay Family website of John B. Robb (http://johnbrobb.com/JBR-GAY-sur.htm#John2Gay):

John’s wife was named Jean, and it was the opinion of Robert H. Montgomery, FASG, also descended from John, that she was Jean Ramsey. The evidence for this rests largely on a hearsay opinion in a late 19th century letter, but there is some circumstantial evidence as well. One complication is that there were several Ramsey families of the Calfpasture, but Mr. Montgomery has done a pretty good job of sorting them out, and the key piece of circumstantial evidence points to a specific family headed by William Ramsey; John Gays wife Jean was probably William’s sister.

The key piece of evidence is that John Gay made Samuel Ramsey one of the three co-executors of his 1775 will. To appreciate the significance of this requires some understanding of the context.

John named three young men as his co-executors—passing over his widow, and his son John, who was only a couple of years short of his maturity. These were, in order: Robert Dunlap, Samuel Ramsey, and James Crockett. The choice of Dunlap and Crockett can be easily accounted for because both were from closely neighboring Calfpasture families whose heads had died young, and both had grown up as wards of John Gay. However, the only Samuel Ramsey of suitable age in 1775 was the Samuel who was the eldest son of William Ramsey who settled originally on the Little Calfpasture no later than 5May1752, when he appears on a road list with several of the Little River Gays. Yet when John made his will in 1775, this Ramsey family had long since relocated some 20 miles south to Whistle Creek, in the Forks of the James. Since in cases where the widow was passed over for the executorship it was considered good form to include a representative of her family in the probate process, it is highly likely that Samuel Ramsey was appointed for that reason.

An alternative possibility for the wife is that she was a sister of John’s close neighbor, Alexander Dunlap, and it is interesting in light of the Scotch-Irish onomastic tradition of naming sons for their grandparents that John’s son, John Gay, Esq., named his second son James Dunlap Gay, although there are other possible explanations for that.