♂George Blanchard

George Blanchard held a farm on the Mystic River at Charlestown and Medford, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, on land that came to him from his father, and he left a will that the probate court disallowed. He was the eighth great-grand-uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the brother of Nathaniel Blanchard (1631–1676), Nancy Jane’s eighth great-grandfather.

The farm

He was the son of Thomas Blanchard, and his mother is not known. A compiled genealogy of Charlestown families, Wyman’s, gives his birth as 1622 and makes him 35 in 1657; Savage’s dictionary of New England settlers says he was born in England and was at Charlestown by 1658. When their father died in 1654, the will named George and his two brothers Nathaniel and Samuel. In 1655 the land was divided: George received twenty acres by the house, twenty of meadow, seven of broken ground and half of a forty-acre pasture, and the other half of the pasture went to Nathaniel. The same genealogy finds his land levied on in suits brought by John Smith in 1666 and John Ball in 1668.

Marriages and children

Wyman’s account gives him two wives, the first named Hills and the second Mary, and fourteen children. The eldest son, Joseph, was by the first wife; the sons Thomas, George, Joshua, Jonathan and Abraham followed, and the daughters included Elizabeth, Hannah, Bethia, Sarah and Rachel, four of whom are given marriages between 1675 and 1691. Joseph died of a fever in October 1694, six years before his father.

Death and the disputed will

A compiled genealogy gives his death on 18 March 1700 (1699–1700 in the older reckoning of the year) at Medford, Middlesex, where Wyman records a gravestone. In October 1689 he had made a will leaving half the farm to Joseph and the other half to his son George, with Abraham to take if George left no heirs. The probate court disallowed the will on 2 April 1700, by which time Joseph was dead. The estate, a house and ninety acres with swamp and woodlots in Medford, was divided among the heirs instead. Joseph’s four children received two lots, and the five children of his daughter Sarah, who had married a Dean, one. Wyman notes “a long contest at law” over the division. His son George sold his brother Abraham his right in the farm the same year.

Notes

Age at death

Wyman gives his age at death as 84 and, from a record, as 82; Savage gives 82. A birth in 1622 would make him 77 or 78 in 1700. The page does not choose among them.

The children

Savage names only three of his children, Nathaniel, Hannah and Sarah, and gives Hannah’s marriage to Thomas Shepard on 7 December 1682. Wyman’s list has no Nathaniel.

The first wife

Wyman gives only the surname Hills. Another published text quotes a suggestion that a widow Elizabeth married a George Blanchard in 1653, and adds that a study of the Hills family shows her second husband was John Blanchard. That marriage is not attached to him here.