♀Hannah Blake

Hannah Blake (1757 – 24 April 1821) was a woman of Harpswell, in what was then the District of Maine^W, who married James Merryman there in 1777 and raised eight children. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Hannah Merryman (1783–1862).

Birth and parents

She was born at Harpswell in 1757, according to the 1905 genealogy Walter Merryman of Harpswell, Maine, and His Descendants by the Rev. Charles Nelson Sinnett; a family pedigree chart gives the day as 12 March 1757. An index of the Harpswell christening records shows a Hannah Blake christened on 12 March 1758, the daughter of Jacob Blake and Mercy. The day and month are those of the pedigree chart’s date, which suggests the chart gave the christening day and the year a year early, though no record says so. An index of Maine marriages records Jacob Blake’s marriage to Mercy Webber at Harpswell on 26 June 1755, and the same christening index lists further children born or christened at Harpswell between 1756 and 1774 to a Jacob Blake. Of these, only a son John, born on 5 May 1756, is indexed with Mercy’s name as well. These entries are index transcriptions. The Harpswell church register, which survives in a typescript copy from 1764, names Mercy as Jacob Blake’s wife at the baptism of a daughter, Anna, in 1772.

Marriage and family

On 14 December 1777, at Harpswell, she married James Merryman (1756–1825), the date the church record gives (the 1905 genealogy has 4 December); a history of Brunswick and Harpswell published in 1878 also gives James’s wife as Hannah Blake. The federal census of 1790 lists two men named John Blake heading households in Harpswell, but no Jacob.

The 1905 genealogy gives the couple eight children, born between 1780 and 1793: John, Molly, Hannah, William, Fanny, Mercy, Lydia and Jacob. In the 1790 census, James’s household held one man, two boys under sixteen and six females; the two boys match the sons the book gives at that date, while the females are two more than Hannah and her three daughters then living, and the records do not say who the others were. Four of her children, according to the book, married into the Stover family, and her daughter Hannah married Walter Merriman, a son of James’s brother Michael, and so her own husband’s nephew. Hannah Blake died on 24 April 1821. She was buried in the Old Harpswell Common Burying Ground, where her gravestone reads: “In memory of Mrs. Hannah Meryman wife of Mr. James Meryman who died April 24, 1821. Æt. 64.” The book dates the death of her daughter Lydia to 23 August of the same year.

Notes

The 1905 genealogy names her mother as Jenny Webber, a daughter of Waitstill Webber and Meribah Hutchins. The christening index names Mercy, and the marriage index gives Jacob Blake’s wife as Mercy Webber. Jenny (Jane) Webber appears in the index as the wife of a John Blake, whom she married at Harpswell in 1759, with children of her own. The book appears to have taken the wife of one Blake for the wife of another. The parentage it gives for Jenny is not carried over to Mercy, whose parents are not known. The Harpswell town register confirms the distinction: it records that John Blake married “Jenny, dau. of Waitstill Webber” on 1 October 1759.

The Harpswell town register, as printed in 1902, gives a Hannah, daughter of Jacob, as born on 29 January 1764 and records her death on 24 April 1821. The cemetery age of 64, her baptism on 12 March 1758 and her marriage in 1777 all point to a birth in 1757, so the register’s 1764 birth date conflicts with the other records and is probably a clerk’s error.