♀Anna Walker Merryman

Anna Walker Merryman (May 1869 – 4 December 1942) was a physician’s wife of Highland Falls, New York, born in Maine. She was the grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975).

Early life

Anna Walker Merryman was born in May 1869 at Topsfield, in Washington County, Maine, the daughter of William Simpson Merryman (1840–1909) and Francis E. Dennett (1846–1925). Her parents had been living at Haverhill, Massachusetts since 1866, and a transcription of the 1880 census finds her there at eleven, in her parents’ household with her sister Maude; there is also a Topsfield in Essex County, Massachusetts, only a few miles from Haverhill, and it has not been settled which Topsfield the family record means. Her middle name follows an older pattern in the family: her great-grandmother, on her mother’s side, was Hannah Walker, wife of Johnson Wilson of Topsham, Maine, and the surname was carried down as a given name to Anna two generations later.

Marriage and family

She married George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) on 5 September 1894 at Haverhill, Massachusetts. The city clerk’s return to the state, recorded on 3 October, enters her as Anna W. Merryman, twenty-five, living at home in Haverhill, and the groom as a physician of Lewiston, Maine; the Reverend George H. Reed married them. A Sons of the American Revolution application filed decades later by their son gives the date instead as 10 November 1894. Her husband trained as a physician and practiced pathology in New York City before setting up practice at Highland Falls, in Orange County, New York, where he worked from 1899 until his retirement in 1927; the family’s census residences at Highland and Highland Falls through 1910, 1920 and 1925 correspond to the years of his practice there. The couple had four children, born between 1895 and 1902: William Wesley, Kenneth, Frances Eldora and Theodore Blanchard.

George Wesley Blanchard died in 1939, and by 1940 Anna, then 68 and widowed, was recorded as head of her own household at Pelham, in Westchester County, New York, having lived in the Bronx a few years earlier.

Death

Anna Walker Merryman died on 4 December 1942 at Pelham, Westchester County, New York, and was buried at Hartsdale, in the same county.

Notes

Her name is Anna in every record of her lifetime: the 1880 census, her 1894 marriage, the 1900 and 1940 censuses and the state’s index of her death in 1942. Her husband’s 1939 New York Times obituary and a son’s Who’s Who entry give it in full as Anna Walker. The family’s 1991 Blanchard–Merryman genealogy calls her Anne, the form the family record used until 2026.

Her exact birthplace is uncertain. The family record gives Topsfield in Washington County, in the far downeast corner of Maine, but her parents were already settled near a different Topsfield, in Massachusetts, when she was born, and her 1894 marriage record gives her birthplace as Topsham, Maine, the town where her parents had married. No record has yet settled the question.

The marriage date of 5 September 1894 comes from the state’s register of marriages; the 10 November 1894 of the later application is the outlier.