♂Daniel Blanchard

Daniel Blanchard (26 March 1727 – 28 August 1798) was a Weymouth man who, at twenty-five, took on the administration of his father’s estate together with his widowed mother. He was the fifth great-grand-uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the brother of Nancy Jane’s fifth great-grandfather Nicholas Blanchard (1736–1801).

His father’s estate

Daniel was born at Weymouth, Suffolk, Massachusetts Bay Colony, on 26 March 1727, the son of John Blanchard (1691–1752) and Elizabeth Gross, whom the town’s records enter as Blancher. His father, Deacon John Blanchard, died on 15 May 1752 without a will. On 7 August the probate court at Boston granted administration of the estate to his widow Elizabeth and to Daniel, who joined her in a bond of £1,000.

Daniel’s own account of the administration survives among the court papers. It lists the funeral, the gravestones and two coffins, money “laid out in my mothers sickness”, and the “completing the letters of Guardianship” for the children still under age.

Marriage and family

On 7 February 1754 Daniel married Mary Pratt at Weymouth. A compiled history of Weymouth families gives her as a daughter of John and Jael (Beal) Pratt, born on 28 June 1735, and credits the couple with twelve children, born between 1755 and 1778. The same history says Daniel lived in Weymouth but owned property at North Yarmouth, in Maine, and, citing the Norfolk probate records, that the court granted administration of his estate on 2 October 1798 to Mary and their sons Ezra and Micah.

War service and death

A Massachusetts roll of Revolutionary soldiers lists a Daniel Blancher of Weymouth, with the book’s own “probably”, as a private in Capt. Thomas Nash’s company of Col. Solomon Lovell’s regiment, paid for four days’ service after 10 March 1776. The same roll puts his younger brother Adam in the same company.

Daniel died at Weymouth on 28 August 1798. The compiled history places his grave, and that of Mary, who outlived him until 27 October 1801, in Highland Cemetery in South Weymouth.

Notes

Children

The tree holds no child for the marriage; the twelve children above come from the compiled history alone.

Age at death

The town’s register of deaths gives his age as 72, and the gravestone reads “in 72d y.”, but by his recorded birth he was 71.

Military service

The roll enters him with the book’s own hedge, “Weymouth (probably)”. It also lists a Daniel Blanchard of Weymouth in another company in 1775 who was 22 in 1777, a younger man, and the two should not be confused.