♂Hezekiah Thayer

Hezekiah Thayer was a townsman of Braintree, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, who in 1729 married Christian, the widow of Moses Thayer, and raised a family there. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Noah Thayer (born 1745).

Marriage and family

His parents were probably Nathaniel Thayer (1658–1728) and Hannah Hayden, and the date of his birth is not known. An 1874 genealogy names a different father, Cornelius Thayer; the Notes weigh the two accounts. At the annual town meeting of 3 March 1728/9, Braintree chose him as one of its hog reeves^W, the officers who dealt with pigs running loose in the town. On 3 November 1729 he married Christian Thayer at Braintree, the register entering them as “Hezekiah Thayer & Christian Thayer both of this Town”. She had been born Christian Aspinall and had married Moses Thayer at Braintree in 1723.

The town register records four children of Hezekiah and Christian: two daughters, Thankful and Dorcas, born in 1732 and 1734, and two sons, Silas and Noah, born in 1742 and on 11 July 1745. The 1874 genealogy adds an eldest son, Hezekiah, born 30 September 1730, whose birth the register does not enter; a Hezekiah Thayer Jr. appears among the town’s officers later in the century. When he died is not known.

Lines of descent

His son Noah, called Noah Thayer 2d in the town records to set him apart from an older man of the same name, was the father of Mary Thayer (1770–1827), born at Braintree in January 1770. Mary married Nicholas Blanchard and settled in Maine, and two of her grandchildren, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), married each other. Their son Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908) descended from Hezekiah Thayer through both parents.

Notes

The town clerk entered the births of Silas and Noah among births of 1756 and 1757, so they were evidently recorded more than ten years after the event. The register spells the elder daughter’s name “Darcos” and gives her birth as 20 August 1734; a Thayer genealogy compiled in 1874 gives 3 August, and it dates the marriage 13 November 1729 against the register’s 3 November. The same genealogy’s death date for him is misprinted (it gives the year 1854), and the Braintree town records printed in 1886 enter no death for him.

Noah is identified as Mary Thayer’s father by elimination: of the several men named Noah Thayer in Braintree at the time, the town records leave only the one born in 1745 who fits.

Parentage

His parents are taken to be Nathaniel Thayer (1658–1728) and Hannah Hayden, and the link is probable rather than proven. A deed of 16 December 1729 by Nathaniel Thayer, eldest son of the late Nathaniel Thayer of Braintree, records a payment “by his brother Hezekiah Thayer of Braintree aforesaid Husbandman”. A release of 25 August 1729 from another son, Richard Thayer, calls him “my youngest brother Hezekiah Thayer” and refers to “my father Nathaniel Thayer’s estate”; that release is known from an abstract of Sprague’s genealogy of the Braintree Thayers.

The 1874 Thayer memorial takes another view. It makes Hezekiah the seventh child of Cornelius and Abigail Thayer and a brother of Moses Thayer, so that, on its account, Christian married her first husband’s younger brother. Sprague’s genealogy of the Braintree Thayers calls Hezekiah “cousin of her first husband, not a brother”, correcting the memorial.

No record yet names him both as Nathaniel’s son and as Christian’s husband. The tie rests on the fact that the only Hezekiah Thayer of age in Braintree in 1729 was Nathaniel’s son, and that in December 1729, a month after the marriage, he bought his brother’s share in their father’s estate.