♀Hannah Hayden

Hannah Hayden was a woman of Braintree, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, who married Nathaniel Thayer there in 1679 and was left his widow in 1728. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Hezekiah Thayer.

Life

She was most likely the daughter of John Hayden and Hannah Ames, who had married at Braintree on 6 April 1660 before the colony’s governor, John Endecott^W. On 27 May 1679, at Braintree, Nathaniel Thayer married Hannah Hayden, whose name the town register writes “Hannah Heiden”. Her husband had been born in the town and was twenty-one. Their children included Nathaniel, the eldest son, Hezekiah, a daughter Hannah born in the mid-1680s, and Zachariah and Ruth, born in 1688 and 1689.

When her father John Hayden died at Braintree on 29 May 1718, aged 83, his will, made four days earlier, left five shillings each to his sons John and Josiah and to his daughters “Hannah Thayer”, Elizabeth Pray, Lydia Vinton and “Abigail Thayer”, and made his son Joseph executor.

Widowhood

Nathaniel Thayer died at Braintree on 28 March 1728. On 16 December 1729 her eldest son Nathaniel, a yeoman of Braintree like his father, sold his share of the family land to his brother Hezekiah, a husbandman of the town; that land still carried, it appears, the dower^W of their widowed mother, Hannah. Hezekiah was most likely the Hezekiah Thayer who had married Christian, the widow of Moses Thayer, at Braintree a month earlier, on 3 November 1729. Hannah is said to have been buried on 29 September 1743, some fifteen years after her husband.

Lines of descent

Hezekiah’s son Noah Thayer (born 1745) was the father of Mary Thayer (1770–1827). Two of Mary’s grandchildren, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), married each other, so their son Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908) descended from Hannah Hayden through both parents.

Notes

Her parents

Her father is identified through John Hayden’s will of 25 May 1718, proved on 23 June 1718, which names a daughter “Hannah Thayer”. There were two John Haydens at Braintree, father and son. A compiled study of the early settlers gives the elder John, whose wife was Susanna, a daughter Hannah born in 1642 who was dead by 1678, so the testator of 1718 is the younger John, who married Hannah Ames in 1660.

Her son Hezekiah

No single record calls Hezekiah, the husband of Christian, her son. The deed of 16 December 1729 names the seller as the eldest son of Nathaniel Thayer, deceased, and the buyer as “his brother Hezekiah Thayer of Braintree aforesaid Husbandman”, and this son is the only Hezekiah Thayer of age in Braintree in 1729. A Thayer genealogy published in 1874 instead makes Christian’s second husband a brother of her first, Moses, son of Cornelius and Abigail Thayer; the later Braintree Thayer genealogy corrects it, making the two men cousins whose mothers, Hannah and Abigail Hayden, were sisters. The “Abigail Thayer” of John Hayden’s will fits that account.

Her widowhood

The mention of her dower comes from a transcription of the 1729 deed. Her burial date comes from the Braintree Thayer genealogy; the town’s printed records enter no death for her.