♀Eleanor C. McManus

Eleanor C. McManus (1 January 1809 – 29 March 1891) was a woman of Brunswick, Maine, the wife of the mariner and farmer John Merryman and the mother of ten children. In 1850 her father, Robert McManus, then 85, was living in her household. She was the great-great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son William Simpson Merryman (1840–1909), his daughter Anna Walker Merryman (1869–1942) and her son Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975). A printed Merryman family genealogy of 1905 records that her elder sister Hannah married her husband’s brother, Captain Enos Merryman, so that two McManus sisters were the wives of two Merryman brothers.

Early life

She was born at Brunswick, in Cumberland County, the daughter of Robert McManus and Eleanor Coombs. The same genealogy names her grandparents on the McManus side as James McManus and Mary Corbett. When she was born, Maine was still a district of Massachusetts, which did not become a separate state until 1820; this is why her christening at Brunswick is recorded under Massachusetts. Her sister Hannah was born at Brunswick on 10 November 1806.

Marriage and family

She married John Merryman, a Brunswick man born in 1808, in about 1827. The couple had ten children, born between 1829 and about 1854. Their eldest daughter, Hannah Ellen, died in January 1844 at the age of fourteen; a daughter born in 1848 was given the same name, Hannah Ellen, and she too died young and unmarried, in the late 1860s. Their son Nathaniel went to California in 1850 as a miner and died at Baker City, Oregon, in 1870. Their daughter Frances married John Henry Woodside in 1853 and died at Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1903; her death return names her parents as John Merryman and Ellen McManus, both born at Brunswick. Augusta married Captain Peleg Curtiss, and Richard married Ella A. Roberts in 1869.

The census of 1850 found the family at Brunswick, with John listed as a mariner, eight children at home, and Eleanor’s father, Robert McManus, aged 85 and a farmer, living with them. By 1870 John was farming, with real estate valued at $5,000 and personal property at $1,625; the household then held Eleanor, keeping house, their youngest daughter Linda, 16, their daughter Lydia, 25, and a ship master named Charles Merryman, 35. The genealogy records that Lydia’s first husband was Charles Spencer Merryman, who died at Callao, Peru, and that she later married Judge Rufus P. Tapley of Saco. The family was still living at Brunswick in 1880.

Death

John Merryman died on 27 February 1891. Eleanor died a month later, on 29 March 1891, at Saco, where her daughter Lydia lived. She was buried in Riverside Cemetery at Brunswick, where the cemetery record lists her as John’s wife.

Notes

The Brunswick town book’s family entry for John Merryman and Ellen C. McManus, copied from the Forsaith Book, gives her birth as 1 January 1809 and lists all ten children with their dates; a christening is also recorded on that day. The 1905 genealogy gives 1 June 1809, and her ages in the censuses of 1850 (40) and 1870 (60) point to about 1809–10. An online cemetery memorial gives 1 January 1808, but no inscription supports it. A family chart compiled in 1994 gives her death as 27 March 1891; the genealogy agrees with 29 March. Her name appears in the records as Eleanor, Elinor and Ellen. The genealogy’s account of Lydia’s marriages is inconsistent as printed: it dates her second marriage to 1 January 1873, ten months before the first husband’s death in November 1873. An 1866 tax list naming an Ellen C. McManus of Brunswick refers to a different, younger woman, the daughter of a George W. McManus.