♀Frances Eldora Blanchard

Frances Eldora Blanchard (21 March 1900 – 19 December 1988) was the only daughter of a New York physician and later a baker in Tampa, Florida, where at fifty she worked a full week in a bakery that the 1950 census lists as owned by her and John S. Green. She was the aunt of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the only sister of Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975), Nancy’s father.

Early life

Frances was born on 21 March 1900 in New York City, the third of the four children of Dr. George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Anna Walker Merryman (1869–1942), and the only girl among three brothers: William Wesley, Kenneth and Theodore. Her father had begun practice at Highland Falls, in Orange County, in 1899, but at the census that June the family was at 63 West 54th Street in Manhattan, and she was two months old. By 1910 the household was at Highland Falls, and she was still of that town when she married.

Marriage to Charles West

A marriage licence was issued at Highland Falls on 17 November 1923, and on 1 December 1923 Frances, aged twenty-three, married Charles Semington West (born about 1900) at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Newburgh. He was a twenty-three-year-old mechanic living in Newburgh; the licence gives his birthplace as Maynard, Arkansas. Both were marrying for the first time, and the witnesses were William W. Blanchard, her brother, and an Anna M. Blanchard, most likely her mother. The couple had two sons: Charles Leamington West, born at Newburgh on 20 October 1924, and George Blanchard West, born in 1926, who died in 1942.

Tampa

By January 1939, when her father’s obituary in The New York Times named his survivors, she was “Mrs. John S. Green of Tampa, Fla.” It is not known when the marriage to West ended. In December 1942 her son Charles, then eighteen and a student, gave his mother’s name on his draft card at Tampa as Mrs. John S. Green, at 56th Street and Robles Avenue. John S. Green was born about 1884 in Florida.

By the 1950 census the couple lived in Hillsborough County. John Green was listed as a salesman at a bakery and Frances as a baker there, working forty hours a week; both were entered as working on their own account. Her answers to the census questions on marriage and children state that she had been married more than once and had borne three children. The third, a son, was one year old.

Later years and death

Frances died at 1:00 in the morning of 19 December 1988, aged eighty-eight, at the Brown County Community Care Center, a nursing home at Nashville, Indiana. Her death certificate names her Frances Eldora Green, widowed, a homemaker whose last home was on Gray Road at Connersville, Fayette County. The cause was an irregular heartbeat with old age; she had a pacemaker. She was cremated at Indianapolis on 23 December.

Notes

Her second marriage

No date is known for the probable marriage to John S. Green. The 1950 census gives eighteen years since her last marriage, which points to about 1932.

Dates, places and spellings

Her birth date is given as 21 March 1900 on the Indiana death certificate and in a 1904 family book of the Webster line. Her youngest child’s surname is spelled Green on the census and Greene in some family charts. The mother’s name appears as “Anna” on the licence and certificate.