♀Emma de Lacy

Emma de Lacy was an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by three separate lines of descent, all through her son Gilbert de Lacy: her twenty-fifth great-grandmother by one line and her twenty-sixth great-grandmother by the other two.

Emma is said to have been a daughter of Walter de Lacy^W, the first Baron Lacy, who died in 1085, and of his wife Ermeline. The name of her husband is not known, and her son, Gilbert de Lacy, carried his mother’s family name.

Lines of descent

All three lines run through her son Gilbert de Lacy and come down on the father’s side of Nancy Jane Blanchard, through her father, Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975). They meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), both descended from Emma, and in Sarah Dudley (1795–1839), whose parents, Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844) and Anna Smith (1764–1825), both descended from her too.

Notes

Sources

Emma is known from C. L. Kingsford’s article “Lacy, Hugh de (d. 1186)” in the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 31 (1892), which names Gilbert de Lacy as the son of “Emma, daughter of Walter de Lacy, first baron”, and adds: “His father’s name is not known.” The same volume’s article “Lacy, Walter de (d. 1085)” names her among Walter’s daughters. No charter or chronicle naming Emma herself is cited there, so her place in the family rests on that printed account.