♀Jean Young

Jean Young (25 May 1898 – 26 April 1977) was a New Rochelle, New York, clubwoman and garden club president who spent her last years in Florida. She was the second wife of Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975), the father of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Early life

She was born at Chatham, Northumberland County, New Brunswick, on 25 May 1898, a daughter of George M. Young and Lida Barker McLeod. The family did not stay in one province: the census of 1901 found them on Prince Edward Island, where her father was head of a household of four young daughters, and by 1911 they were living at Halifax, Nova Scotia. They were Methodists and described themselves as Scotch. Her mother returned to New Brunswick in later life and is buried at Fredericton, where one of her sisters was still living in 1977.

New Rochelle

On 15 April 1933 she married William Jordan Exum in Manhattan. From 1945 she made her home in New Rochelle, Westchester County, New York, and it is there that she is best recorded. She was a past president of the Garden Club of New Rochelle, and was active in the Women’s Club, the Larchmont Shore Club and the Presbyterian Church of New Rochelle. She lived in the town for about nineteen years before moving to Florida.

Florida and second marriage

Widowed, she settled at Lighthouse Point on the Broward County coast. In January 1969 a marriage licence was issued there to her and to Kenneth Blanchard, a retired physician, and they married the following month. A notice in a local paper that March credited the match to his brother Theodore Blanchard and his wife, of nearby Deerfield. She was in her seventies by then and he in his, and they had no children. She kept up the same kind of life she had led in New York: a society column of February 1974 places her at a Lighthouse Point garden club gathering.

Her husband died in March 1975, and the death notices published in two Florida papers named her as his surviving wife. She died at Boca Raton on 26 April 1977 after a brief illness. Her obituary in the New Rochelle Standard-Star recorded that she had been twice widowed and named her two surviving sisters, Helen Young of Fredericton and Mrs. John McArthur of Brampton, Ontario.

Notes

Her age is given differently in nearly every document she left behind. The New Brunswick baptism register and the census of 1901, which recorded exact dates of birth rather than ages, both give 25 May 1898. She was recorded as twenty-nine at her marriage in 1933, when she was thirty-four, as sixty-four on her 1969 marriage licence, when she was seventy, and her obituary gave her birth year as 1904. The day and month are consistent throughout; only the year moves.

The same obituary calls her a native of Fredericton. The register places her birth at Chatham, about a hundred and fifty miles away; Fredericton is where her mother and sister ended up, not where she began.

Her parents are known from her 1933 marriage record, which names them both. Her sisters have not been traced beyond the census years and the obituary, and the sister at Brampton, called Sunny in print, has not been matched to any of the given names recorded for the family.