Hayward was featured in performances in Boston, New York, Chicago, and across the country. He was born 1834 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England. He was the son of Henry Hayward Sr. and Maria Howell Hayward. His father, who was born in England and was an English gardener for some of the wealthier residents of the city of Manchester, New Hampshire.

William married Georgianna Durant, born Jan. 29, 1847, the daughter of Mary Elizabeth Farwell and William Frye Durant, on January 1, 1866, he being 31 and she was 18.
They had one son, William Henry ‘Harry’ Hayward. They were both concert singers. Georgianna was the 1st cousin of Lieut. Charles Austin Hale of the 5th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry.

After Williams death in Manchester, N.H. Jul. 14, 1874 and burial in the Valley Cemetery of the same city, Georgianna remarried Frank Messenger Lyon, a student at Dartmouth College, illness forced his leaving school and he was in the paper business with his father in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts where the couple lived. They had no children. Georgianna died in 1930 at age 82 in Florida.

A concert singer of note in New England during the Civil War period, he was the son of a Manchester, N.H., English landscape gardener and the brother of Henry Hayward, who served as captain and commander of Company E of the Second New Hampshire Infantry and died in action at Cold Harbor, Va., on June 3, 1864.

2. General Nathaniel P. Banks

3. President Abraham Lincoln

4. Mary Todd Lincoln by Allen in Boston

5. President Andrew Johnson

6. General Ulysses S. Grant

7. General Benjamin Franklin Butler

8. General Philip Sheridan

9. An Unidentified Family of Singers