♀Christian Aspinall

Christian Aspinall (born 2 August 1704) was a woman of Braintree, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, who married two men of the town’s large Thayer family in turn: Moses Thayer in 1723 and, after his death, Hezekiah Thayer in 1729. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Noah Thayer (born 1745).

First marriage

She was born at Boston, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, on 2 August 1704. Her parents were probably John Aspinall and his wife Christian. On 6 August 1723 the Reverend Samuel Niles married her at Braintree to Moses Thayer; the register writes her name “Christian Aspinal”. The town register records two daughters of Moses and Christian, both named Christian, born on 14 May 1724 and 12 April 1726. Moses died within a few years of the marriage; a Thayer genealogy compiled in 1874 gives his death in 1727, at the age of twenty-five.

Second marriage

On 3 November 1729 she married Hezekiah Thayer at Braintree, the register entering them as “Hezekiah Thayer & Christian Thayer both of this Town”. The Thayer genealogy of 1874 makes Hezekiah and Moses Thayer brothers, both sons of Cornelius and Abigail Thayer; a later genealogy of the Braintree Thayers calls Hezekiah a cousin of her first husband instead, and two family deeds of 1729 point to Nathaniel Thayer as his father. The town register records four children of Hezekiah and Christian: two daughters, Thankful and Dorcas, born in 1732 and 1734, and two sons, Silas and Noah, born in 1742 and on 11 July 1745. The same genealogy adds an eldest son, Hezekiah, born 30 September 1730, whose birth the register does not enter; a Hezekiah Thayer Jr. appears among the town’s officers later in the century. When she died is not known.

Lines of descent

Her son Noah, called Noah Thayer 2d in the town records to set him apart from an older man of the same name, was the father of Mary Thayer (1770–1827), born at Braintree in January 1770. Mary married Nicholas Blanchard and settled in Maine, and two of her grandchildren, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), married each other. Their son Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908) descended from Christian Aspinall through both parents.

Notes

Her maiden name is written “Aspinal” in the Braintree register and “Aspinwall” in the 1874 Thayer genealogy. The Boston birth register entry for 2 August 1704 reads “Christian daughter of John Aspinall and Christian his Wife”; it is the only Aspinall birth in that volume, and she was nineteen at her marriage to Moses Thayer in 1723. The entry does not give her mother’s maiden name, and the identification of this woman with that entry, and so with the bride of 1723, is a probable one. The 1874 Thayer genealogy dates the elder daughter’s birth 14 March 1724 and the second marriage 13 November 1729; the register gives 14 May 1724 and 3 November 1729. The Braintree town records printed in 1886 enter no death for her.

Noah is identified as Mary Thayer’s father by elimination: of the several men named Noah Thayer in Braintree at the time, the town records leave only the one born in 1745 who fits.