♂Alexander Blanchard

Alexander Blanchard (22 December 1799 – 17 September 1850) was a Weymouth-born settler of Freeman, in Franklin County, Maine, called “Capt. Alexander Blanchard” in the records, whose daughter Elizabeth married her first cousin, the son of his brother Noah. He was the third great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884).

Early life

Alexander was born at Weymouth, Massachusetts, on 22 December 1799, the sixth of the children born at Weymouth to Nicholas Blanchard (1766–1849) and Mary Thayer (1770–1827); his elder brother Noah had been born there in 1797. His birth does not appear in the printed Weymouth vital records, which hold the baptisms of his elder siblings, and the date comes from a history of Weymouth published in 1923, which lists him among the children of Nicholas and Mary. The record that ties him to his father is his own death entry, which names the father as Nicholas Blanchard; it names no mother, so Mary Thayer rests on the history. He lived at Freeman, the Maine township where his mother died in 1827 and where Noah was still living in 1850. The family had left Weymouth for the Kingfield and Freeman district of Maine, then part of Massachusetts, early in the century.

First marriage and children

According to family records, Alexander married Sarah Dudley (1795–1839), known as Sally, on 29 June 1822 at Phillips, a neighboring Franklin County town; no record of the marriage has been found. Family records give her birth at Mount Vernon, in Kennebec County, though no birth record has been found. The 1923 history lists five children, all born at Freeman: Mary Ann in 1823, Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard on 26 September 1825, Alexander on 28 March 1828, Marcellus on 23 January 1831 and Horatio Nelson in 1834. Dean Dudley’s 1886 history of the Dudley family gives Sarah the same count, three sons and two daughters. Sarah died at Freeman on 20 February 1839 and was buried in the North Freeman cemetery.

Mary Ann married Thomas W. Cushing at Weymouth on 11 December 1845; the town’s index of the marriage names her parents as Alexander Blanchard and Sarah Dudley, as Horatio’s Weymouth death record of 1863 does for him. Elizabeth married her first cousin Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885), the eldest son of Alexander’s brother Noah, so that her children descended from Nicholas Blanchard and Mary Thayer through two of their sons. A family chart dates that wedding to April 1840, when she was fourteen, but no record of it has been found.

Master mariner

The title “Capt.” was a ship’s master’s: the federal census taken at Weymouth on 27 August 1850 lists Alexander as a master mariner, and the 1857 probate petition below calls him the same, though no vessel under his command has been found. He is called “Capt.” in his 1839 Weymouth marriage entry and again in the town’s 1845 marriage return.

His sons went to sea as well. Marcellus swore a seaman’s citizenship affidavit at Bath, Maine, in December 1848, giving his age as eighteen, and the 1850 census lists him, aged twenty, as a mariner in his father’s house, with Horatio also a mariner. The 1923 history says only that Marcellus “d. at sea”; it gives no date, and the 1857 partition still counts him among the owners. The eldest son, Alexander Jr., was a coaster (a seaman in the coastal trade) when he married Candace H. Chandler of Halifax, Massachusetts, at Hanson on 1 April 1849, five months after the intention was entered at Weymouth. The same history says that he “removed to California”.

Second marriage

On 29 September 1839, seven months after Sarah’s death, Alexander married again at Weymouth. The town’s register records the marriage as that of “Sarah H. and Capt. Alexander Blanchard of Freeman, Me.” His second wife was Sarah Hovey Thayer, born at Weymouth on 3 November 1802, a daughter of Capt. Demetrius Thayer of Braintree and Alexander’s aunt Sarah Blanchard, so that Alexander married his first cousin, as the Norfolk County probate order of 5 April 1803 on his grandfather Nicholas Blanchard’s estate, which names “Sarah Thayer, wife of Demetrius Thayer” among the children, and the Weymouth birth entry for “Sarah Hovey Thayer, d. Capt. Demetrius and Sarah” together show.

She died at Freeman on 24 May 1840, eight months after the wedding, aged 37 years and 6 months; Weymouth entered her death among its own, under her married name.

Third marriage and the heirs of 1857

Alexander’s third wife was Susan B. Bates; her marriage to him has not been found, though the printed Pembroke vital records give the intention of “Susan B. and Alex Blanchard of Weymouth, int. Sept. 20, 1840” under the surname Bates, which is how her maiden name appears in print. The 1923 history gives them a first son, Leonard, born and dead on 25 June 1841, and state and town indexes list the children born at Weymouth after him: Leonard Wesley in 1843, Wilbur Fiske (1845–1846) and Sarah Wilder (1846–1847).

In 1857 a petition in the Norfolk County probate court for the partition of the estate of “Alexander Blanchard late of Weymouth”, master mariner, named six heirs each owning a sixth: Alexander, Marcellus, Mary Ann Cushing, “Elizabeth Blanchard wife of Joseph K. Blanchard of Readfield Maine”, Nelson and Westly, with a dower for Susan Blanchard, the widow. Five are the children of his first marriage; Nelson is evidently Horatio Nelson, and Westly is most likely Leonard Wesley, the one child of the third marriage who grew up. The petition makes Elizabeth his child by a record.

Return to Weymouth and death

Alexander later returned to Weymouth, where he was living in 1850. He died there on 17 September 1850, aged fifty, of apoplexy. The town’s register of deaths enters him as a married mariner and names his father, written “Niclas Blanchard”. A notice in the Quincy Patriot, dated Weymouth, 19 October 1850, announced that Lemuel Humphrey had been appointed administrator of his estate. The 1923 history gives his death as 22 September 1851, a year out against both. He was buried in September 1850 in Fairmount Cemetery in Weymouth.

Notes

The Weymouth records also hold a marriage intention of 6 September 1840 between an Alexander Blanchard and “Susan B. of Pembrook”, and the death from croup on 25 May 1847 of Sarah W., an infant daughter of Alexander and Susan B. They most likely belong to him and Susan B. Bates, whose surname appears in the Pembroke record of the same intention, dated 20 September, but the intention has not been joined to him in the family record.