♂John Blanchard

John Blanchard (14 October 1691 – 15 May 1752) was a yeoman and deacon of the church at Weymouth, Massachusetts, who mortgaged his farm to the short-lived Land Bank of 1740, the colonists’ experiment in issuing their own paper money. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Nicholas Blanchard (1736–1801).

Early life

He was born at Weymouth on 14 October 1691, a son of John Blanchard and his wife Abigail. The town clerk of Weymouth entered the family’s name variously as Blancher, Blanchar and Blansher; the spelling Blanchard is that of later generations, and the county court still filed his own estate under Blancher. On 25 April 1733, a few weeks after his father’s death, he and his brothers Thomas, Samuel, Nathaniel and Jonathan divided “the Estate of our Father John Blancher Deced”, in an agreement recorded in the Suffolk County probate records.

Marriage and family

An intention of marriage was recorded at Weymouth on 14 December 1719 between John Blanchard and Elizabeth Gross of Hingham. A compiled history of Weymouth gives the wedding as 4 April 1720 at Boston, but no record of it is known. The only Elizabeth Gross of marrying age in the Hingham records is Elizabeth, born there on 13 January 1699/1700 to Edmund Gross, a cooper of Liberty Plain in the south of the town, and his wife Martha. Edmund’s will of 1727 left a share of the town’s undivided common lands to “my Seven Children namely Elizabeth …”, but it gives none of his daughters a married name, and no record has been found that ties the Weymouth wife to his family. A genealogy column in the Boston Transcript reached the same identification in 1922 on the same grounds, and it remains unproven.

The couple had eleven children, born at Weymouth between 1721 and 1744. Three died young: Joshua in 1729 and Nehemiah in 1738, each within weeks of birth, and Abner, the tenth child, on 15 November 1751 at the age of nine, recorded in the town book as “s. Dea. John”. Of the others, Daniel and David married in Weymouth in the 1750s and lived out their lives there, and their daughter Elizabeth married Samuel Curtis of Braintree in 1758.

The Land Bank

In the autumn of 1740 John and Elizabeth Blanchard mortgaged fifty-five acres of their Weymouth land, bounded on the south by his brother Thomas’s farm, to the directors of the Manufactory Company, the “Land Bank” that issued its own paper money against members’ land; among the directors was Samuel Adams, father of the revolutionary leader. John took £100 in the company’s bills for “his Share as a Partner”, repayable over twenty years. Parliament suppressed the Land Bank the following year, and its partners were left personally liable for its notes, a dispute that dragged on for years afterwards.

Death

He died at Weymouth on 15 May 1752, aged 60. A compiled history of the town makes him deacon of the Second Church from 1743 until his death. He was buried in Lakeview Cemetery, Weymouth. His gravestone, transcribed in the town’s vital records, reads “Dea. John … in 61st y.” He left no will. On 7 August 1752 the probate court at Boston granted administration of the estate of “John Blancher late of Weymouth … Yeoman … Intestate” to his widow Elizabeth and their son Daniel; she signed the bond, and later the account, by her mark. The inventory, proved that December, lists a weaver’s loom, a gun, sword and cartridge box, a horse and a yoke of oxen, four cows, young cattle, swine and sheep. Daniel’s account of the estate records the funeral, gravestones and coffins, money “laid out in my mothers sickness”, and letters of guardianship for the children still under age.

Lines of descent

Both lines pass through his son Nicholas (1736–1801) and his grandson Nicholas (1766–1849), and divide between the younger Nicholas’s sons Noah (1797–1875) and Alexander (1799–1850). They meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were first cousins and both great-great-grandchildren of this John.

Notes

His identity as the son born in 1691 was first worked out from the “Jr.” used to distinguish him from his father in the birth records of his own children, together with the age on his gravestone; the 1733 division of his father’s estate confirms it. Elizabeth’s surname rests on the 1719 marriage intention; her Hingham parentage is a likely identification, not a proven one. A Find a Grave transcription of the gravestone reads 1732 for his death; the town’s vital records (Weymouth, vol. II, p. 249) cite the same stone for 15 May 1752.