♂James Merryman

James Merryman (1756 – 4 August 1825) was a householder of Harpswell, in what was then the District of Maine, whose family of eight children is set out in a genealogy published in 1905 and borne out, son for son, by the federal census of 1790. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Hannah Merryman (1783–1862).

Family background

He was born at Harpswell, Cumberland County, in 1756, when the District of Maine was part of Massachusetts; Maine became a separate state in 1820. The Harpswell christening records, as indexed, show him christened on 20 March 1756, the son of Walter Merriman. The 1905 genealogy, Walter Merryman of Harpswell, Maine, and His Descendants by the Rev. Charles Nelson Sinnett, makes him the fourth son of Walter Merryman, the first of the family at Harpswell, and Betsy Potter. His brothers, in the book’s order, were Thomas, Hugh, Walter and Michael; Michael Merryman (1760–1848) was the youngest. An earlier town history, published in 1878 by George Augustus and Henry Warren Wheeler, names the same five sons and gives James’s wife as Hannah Blake.

Both books preserve the family’s tradition that the first Walter was an Irishman, kidnapped at Dublin and brought to Boston, where he was sold for the cost of his passage to a Mr. Simonton of Cape Elizabeth, and that after serving his time he settled at Harpswell. The two accounts are not independent of each other: the 1878 history names a Merryman and a Sinnett of the same descendant family as its informants, and the 1905 genealogy was written by a Sinnett. For James himself, the indexed christening names his father, Walter Merriman; his mother’s name and the parentage of his brothers come from these compilations, not from the Harpswell town records.

Marriage and family

On 14 December 1777, at Harpswell, he married Hannah Blake (1757–1821), a Harpswell woman baptized there in 1758 as a daughter of Jacob Blake and his wife Mercy (the 1905 genealogy calls her mother Jenny Webber, but Jacob’s wife was Mercy Webber). The church record gives that wedding date; the 1905 genealogy has 4 December. The book gives the couple eight children, born between 1780 and 1793: John, Molly, Hannah, William, Fanny, Mercy, Lydia and Jacob.

The federal census of 1790 found seven Merriman households in Harpswell, headed by Thomas, Hugh, James, Michael, two men named Walter, and a Timothy whom neither book mentions. Several of them were listed within a few doors of one another. James’s household held one man aged sixteen or over, two boys under sixteen and six females. The two boys match the sons the 1905 genealogy gives him at that date, John and William, exactly. The females are two more than his wife and three daughters then living, and the records do not say who the other two were. The census records age groups rather than birth years, and it was taken more than a century before the book, so the agreement is independent evidence for the book’s account of this household.

The 1905 genealogy follows each child’s marriage. John married Elizabeth Stover, William married Miriam Stover, Fanny married Silvester Stover, and Lydia married Capt. John Stover. Molly married Capt. Nathaniel Merryman. Hannah married her first cousin Walter Merriman (1785–1867), a son of James’s brother Michael, in 1805. The book records that relationship in two separate chapters, but both come from the same compiler.

Death

Hannah Blake died on 24 April 1821. James Merryman died on 4 August 1825, aged about sixty-nine. A compiled Maine cemetery collection gives his burial at Harpswell Center (Old) cemetery.

Notes

An index of the Harpswell town birth register names James Merryman and Hannah Blake as the parents of eight children born between 1780 and 1793, the same eight the 1905 genealogy lists. The index gives Hannah’s birth as 11 May 1783, as the book does, and Molly’s, under the name Mary, as 25 December 1782, where the book has 11 December 1782. Two births to one mother less than five months apart cannot both be right, so one of the years is wrong, in the register or in the book.

The 1878 town history also mentions, in its account of another Brunswick family, a widow Ham who “afterwards m. James Merryman, of Harpswell”. His own family entry in the same book names only Hannah Blake as his wife. The records do not show whether this was a second marriage of this James after Hannah’s death in 1821, or another man of the same name.