♀Jane Beauchamp

Jane Beauchamp (1760–1821) was the wife of John Harvey (1757–1819), known almost entirely through the lineage papers her descendants filed with the Daughters of the American Revolution. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Beauchamp Harvey (1788–1859).

Family trees give her birth as 1760 in Virginia and her death as 1821 in Illinois, but no record of either has been found, and one compiled family chart places her death in Ohio instead. One of the society’s applications names her as “Jane Beauchamp (m. John Harvey, 1784)”, the only source for the year of the marriage, and another ends its line of descent with “John Harvey/Jane Beauchamp”; both are claims made by descendants, not records of her life. Two sons are named in the family record: Beauchamp, who carried his mother’s maiden name as his first name and whose gravestone age places his birth on 5 December 1788 (family trees give Baltimore, Maryland, and the year 1789), and Joseph, given a birth year of 1791. No record of her parents has been found. Two published Beauchamp genealogies name no Jane Beauchamp married to a Harvey: Stith Thompson’s 1954 account of the Maryland Beauchamp family, which follows its lines from Somerset County into Kentucky, Indiana and Texas, and Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry, which treats only the medieval English Beauchamps. Mount Carmel, Illinois, where her son settled in 1819, had been founded two years earlier by three Methodist ministers, one of them William Beauchamp; no record connects him to her.