♀Christian Ager

Christian Ager was a woman of Boston, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, who married John Aspinall there on 19 May 1701. A daughter, also named Christian, was born to John Aspinall and his wife Christian on 2 August 1704. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Christian Aspinall (born 1704).

The birth entry names the mother only as “Christian his Wife”; that she is Christian Ager of the 1701 marriage is probably right. The daughter’s is the only Aspinall birth Boston entered in its register between 1700 and 1800. A Christian Aspinal married Moses Thayer at Braintree, south of Boston, on 6 August 1723, and a Christian Thayer married Hezekiah Thayer there in 1729, after Moses’s death.

Lines of descent

The younger Christian’s son Noah Thayer (born 1745) was the father of Mary Thayer (1770–1827). Two of Mary’s grandchildren, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), married each other, and their son Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908) descended from the elder Christian through both parents.

Notes

The marriage at Boston

The Boston city register entry for 19 May 1701 names the couple as John Aspinwall and Christian Ager, and gives “Mr Cotton Mather” as the minister. The Aspinwall genealogy of 1901 cites the same entry and spells the surname Aspinwall; it is given here as Aspinall.

The daughter who married at Braintree

The birth is entered in Boston’s register of births as “Christian daughter of John Aspinall and Christian his Wife, Born 2 August 1704” (Boston Births 1700-1800, Record Commissioners’ report vol. 24, p. 26). That she is the Christian Aspinal married at Braintree in 1723 is an inference, not a statement of any record: the pairing of the name Christian with the surname Aspinall is unusual, hers is the only such birth in Boston in the century, and her age at the marriage fits. The Braintree register spells the name “Aspinal” and a Thayer genealogy of 1874 “Aspinwall”.

Her name

The birth register gives her only as “Christian his Wife”; the marriage record of 1701 gives her name as Christian Ager. The dates of her birth and death are not known.