The Jay family in America was founded by John Jay’s grandfather, Auguste or Augustus Jay (1665–1751). According to a memorandum on the family’s history prepared by John Jay, Augustus came from a prominent Huguenot family in La Rochelle, where his father, Pierre, was “an active and opulent merchant.” Augustus was trained to take his place in the Jay mercantile empire. At the age of twelve, he was sent to England for further education. Six years later, he sailed to Africa for a lengthy visit. During Augustus’s absence, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes forced his parents and brother and sister to flee to England in 1685. The young merchant returned to La Rochelle to find his family gone and their property confiscated. “Augustus,” his grandson wrote, “very properly reflected that his parents had two younger children to provide for, and that it became him to depend on his own exertions.”1

Those “exertions” took Augustus Jay to America. The young Protestant merchant slipped out of Catholic France and sailed to South Carolina. Within a year he had moved to New York, where he found a congenial Huguenot community that worshipped at L’Eglise des Refugiés, the “French Church.” On a trading voyage to Hamburg in 1692, Augustus’s ship was captured and he, with the other passengers, was imprisoned at St. Malo. Making his escape at night, Augustus found his way to England, where he was reunited with his father and his sister, Françoise (d. 1742), the only surviving members of the family, before sailing back to New York.2

In New York, Augustus Jay soon acquired social position and financial security. The former came with his marriage to Anna Maria Bayard (1670–1756) in 1697.3 Anna Bayard’s father was the nephew of Governor Peter Stuyvesant and the descendant of French Protestants who found refuge in the Netherlands in the late sixteenth century.4 Her mother was the second daughter of Govert Loockermans, who, on his death in 1670, was perhaps the wealthiest man in the colony. On her mother’s side, Augustus Jay’s bride counted Van Cortlandts, Van Rensselaers, and Schuylers among her cousins.5 Exploiting his wife’s family connections and drawing upon his own talents, Augustus Jay built a respectable fortune. He became a freeman of the City of New York and a vestryman of Trinity Church.6 His ships crossed the Atlantic and reached the West Indies on their trading voyages, and in business, he found a valuable correspondent in Stephen Peloquin (d. 1721), the Bristol widower who had married his sister, Françoise.7

Augustus and Anna Bayard Jay saw four of their children live to adulthood. Their three daughters were Judith (1698–1757), who married Cornelius Van Horne (1694–1752); Marie (1700–1762), who was the wife of Pierre or Peter Vallette (d. 1752); and Françoise (1701–80), also known as Frances and Francena, who wed Frederick Van Cortlandt (1698–1750). Their only son, Peter (1704–82), was John Jay’s father.8

Peter Jay was as carefully trained for a mercantile career as had been his father. At the age of eighteen, Peter sailed to Europe, where he spent much time in London and Amsterdam and visited such relatives as the Peloquins of Bristol and the Mouchards in Paris.9 When he returned to New York, he again followed his father’s example by making an advantageous marriage. On 31 January 1728, Peter Jay wed his mother’s young second cousin, Mary Anna Van Cortlandt (1705–77), the daughter of Jacobus and Eve Philipse Van Cortlandt and the granddaughter of the first proprietor of the Manor of Philipsburg.10

For many years, Peter and Mary Jay lived in prosperous ease in Manhattan. A freeman of the city and a vestryman of Trinity Church, Peter traded with Europe and the West Indies as had his father.11 Eventually, however, family tragedy ended this comfortable pattern. Of the ten children born to Peter and Mary Jay, seven lived to adulthood: Eve (1728–1810), Augustus (1730–1801), James (1732–1815), Peter (1734–1813), Anna Maricka (1737–91), John (1745–1829), and Frederick (1747–99). The eldest Jay daughter, Eve, suffered from ill health, fits, and possibly epilepsy. The eldest Jay son, Augustus, was mentally disabled. Three Jay children, Jacobus or James (April 1731–October 1731), Frederick I (April 1744–June 1744), and Mary (November 1748–April 1752), did not survive childhood. Two of the children, Peter and Anna Maricka, were blinded by smallpox in the epidemic of 1738.12 For a few years the Jays tried to rear their afflicted children in Manhattan, but this proved impractical. During King George’s War (1744–45), Peter Jay wrote that he had “in a great measure discontinued trade, being unwilling to risque much in precarious times Considering the helpless condition of part of my family.”13 A few months after John Jay’s birth in December 1745, the family moved to Rye, where “the little blind ones” would be safe from “the dangers and confusions of the city life.”14