♂John F. Sanford

John F. Sanford (14 October 1876 – 25 October 1961) was a Maine druggist who kept a drug business at York for more than a decade before turning to farming in Franklin County, near the town where he was born. He married three times, and the first two marriages both ended in divorce. He was the nephew of Eldora M. Webster (1846–1913), the great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), and a first cousin of her grandfather George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939).

Early life

John was born on 14 October 1876, the son of Peleg G. Sanford and Emma H. Webster (born 1850), the youngest daughter of Benjamin Webster (1802–1884) and Harriet Clough (1809–1887). A memorial of the Webster family, compiled by his uncle John C. Webster in 1904, gives his full name as John Foy Sanford and his exact date of birth; it also records an elder brother, Harry, who was born in December 1873 and died the following month. Both of John’s later marriage records give his birthplace as Kingfield, in Franklin County. In the census of 1880 he was three years old, living at Kingfield with his parents in the same house as his Webster grandparents; his father was then working in a tannery and his grandfather was a clock repairer.

By 1900 the family had moved to Lewiston, in Androscoggin County. That June John, aged 23 and single, was living in his father’s household on Lowell Street and working as a drug clerk, though he told the enumerator he had been out of work for six months of the year. The family memorial of 1904 describes him as an apothecary.

Druggist at York

On 29 August 1900, at Livermore, he married Lucerne Spencer (1879–1949), who was from that town. City directories place him at Bangor or Brewer in 1903, at Eliot in 1905 and at Portland in 1912. The census of 1910 found the couple at York, in York County, in a home they owned with a mortgage on Long Sands Road, with a young niece living with them; John gave his work as a retail merchant in drugs. The marriage ended in divorce some time between 1910 and 1915. In 1920 he was still at York and still a druggist.

Second and third marriages

On 18 October 1915, at Newburyport, Massachusetts, John, aged 38, married A. Blanche Cater (born 1895), a 20-year-old clerk from Dover, New Hampshire. The Newburyport record calls it the second marriage for each of them, and both are listed as divorced, so Blanche had already been married and divorced once before she turned twenty. Their daughter, Muriel Emma, was born at York on 24 January 1916, three months after the wedding. This marriage also ended in divorce, some time between 1916 and 1921.

On 7 June 1921, at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, John married Sibyl E. Landers (1900–1955), a 22-year-old from Kingfield, for whom it was a first marriage. On the record he is 44, divorced and a contractor, and he gave the number of the marriage as his second, although it was his third.

By 1930 John and Sibyl had settled at Freeman, the town next to Kingfield, where John, now 52, was farming, with Muriel, aged fifteen, in the household. Their own daughter, Effie L., was born in 1933 and died in 1935. John and Sibyl were still at Freeman in 1940, and by 1950 they had moved back to Kingfield, where he was again listed as a farmer. Sibyl died in 1955.

Death

A Find a Grave memorial gives his death as 25 October 1961 and his burial at Sunnyside Cemetery, Kingfield, where his daughter Effie also lies. Muriel died in 1992 at Cedartown, Georgia.

Notes

The 1930 census lists Muriel as John’s daughter in a household with Sibyl, and a Find a Grave memorial names Sibyl as his wife beside Muriel and Effie. Sibyl, though, was born in March 1900 and would have been fifteen when Muriel was born. Two of Muriel’s own later records, her Social Security file and her 1963 marriage record, name her mother as Blanche Cater (spelled “Kader” in 1963). With the date of the 1915 marriage, those records show that Blanche was Muriel’s mother; the 1930 census and the memorial list her with her stepmother.

The 1930 census gives John’s age at his first marriage as 22. He was 23 in August 1900.