The Merryman cousins

Nancy Jane Blanchard’s grandmother was Anne Walker Merryman, born in Maine in 1869. Going back along that Merryman line: Anne’s father was William Simpson Merryman, his father was John Merryman, and his parents were Walter Merriman and Hannah Merryman, a couple who married on 1 October 1805. They are Nancy’s three-times-great-grandparents.

You’ll notice they already shared a surname. That is not a coincidence, and a book published in 1905 explains why.

The Merrymans of Harpswell, Maine all descend from one man the book simply calls “the Ancestor”, a Walter Merryman who, according to family tradition, was kidnapped from an Irish port as a boy and shipped to Boston, where a Mr. Simonton of Cape Elizabeth paid his passage and taught him ship carpentry. He had several sons, and the book gives each of them a chapter of his own.

Two of those sons matter to us. James, born 1756, and Michael, born 1760: brothers.

James had a daughter Hannah, born 1783. Michael had a son Walter, born 1785. Those two married each other in 1805, when she was twenty-two and he was twenty.

So Hannah and Walter were first cousins: their fathers were brothers. The reason a Merryman married a Merryman is that they were closely related to begin with, which in a small coastal Maine town in 1805 was ordinary rather than remarkable.

The practical consequence is that the old Ancestor sits in Nancy’s family tree twice over: once through his son James, once through his son Michael. Normally every ancestor occupies one place in a family tree; he occupies two. For anyone doing DNA testing on this branch that matters. Relatives descending from this couple will share noticeably more DNA with each other than the family tree alone would predict, because the same man’s DNA comes down two separate paths.

And it turns out this happened twice in Nancy’s family. One generation closer to her, Joseph Knapp Blanchard married Elizabeth Thayer Blanchard, and their fathers, Noah and Alexander Blanchard, were also brothers. That second cousin marriage isn’t a claim from a book; it is already fully documented in our own records, with both sets of parents recorded. Cousins marrying cousins was simply a pattern in this family.

Two honest cautions. First, the Merryman version rests on a single book by a single compiler, and although he states it on two different pages, that is one man being consistent with himself rather than two independent sources agreeing. Second, that book has demonstrable mistakes elsewhere: it gives one woman's age as 66 when her own dates make her 76, and it has another woman remarrying before her first husband had died. So we have written the relationship down as what the book says, and we have not added Walter's or Hannah's parents to the tree. The record that would settle it is the Harpswell town register of Hannah's birth in 1783, and that is now on our list of documents to find.

One useful thing came out of reading the whole book rather than the two pages read previously. Our notes said the book gave Hannah's birth as 13 May 1783, against our own 11 January 1783. The book actually says 11 May, twice. So the disagreement is only the month, with the day identical in both, which looks far more like one slipped month than two competing family traditions. That correction is now in her record.