♀Constance (surname unknown)

Constance (buried 19 March 1561/2) was a woman of Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, England, in the first years of the reign of Elizabeth I. She was the twelfth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Johannes Tawier.

Her maiden name, her birth and her parents are not known; the register buries her under her married name, written “Constans Tawier”. She and her husband John are the earliest of the Thornbury Tawiers from whom the Thayer family is traced, and Johannes Tawier is said to have been their son. John was buried at Thornbury on 11 February 1561, and Constance followed him on 19 March 1561/2.

Lines of descent

Both lines to Nancy Jane Blanchard run through her son Johannes Tawier and his son Richard Thayer (baptized 1562), whose descendants carried the name, written Tayer and later Thayer. The two lines meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), both descended from John and Constance.

Notes

The 1922 column

The family link rests on a genealogy column printed in the Boston Evening Transcript^W in 1922, which traces the Thayers back from Thornbury and names John and Constance as the parents of Johannes Tawier. The column goes no further back than this couple. The Thornbury register of the 1560s names a child’s godparents, not the parents, so it cannot test the link; the two burials themselves are in the register.

Date

Under the Old Style calendar^W the English year then began on 25 March, so her March burial is written 1561/2, which is 1562 by modern reckoning. The index of the register gives the year 1561 for John’s burial on 11 February as well. If that is the register’s own year, he was buried only five weeks before her, in 1561/2, rather than a year earlier; his date is given here as 11 February 1561.