♂John Merryman

John Merryman (5 October 1808 – 27 February 1891) was a mariner and later a farmer of Brunswick, Maine, whose marriage to Eleanor C. McManus lasted some sixty-four years; the couple died within a month of each other in 1891. He was the great-great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son William Simpson Merryman (1840–1909), whose daughter Anna Walker Merryman (1869–1942) was the mother of Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975), Nancy Jane’s father.

Early life

He was born on 5 October 1808 at Brunswick, Cumberland County, which was then part of Massachusetts; Maine became a separate state in 1820. His parents were Walter Merriman (1785–1867) and Hannah Merryman (1783–1862), both born at neighboring Harpswell, who married in 1805. The surname is spelled both ways in the records. According to a genealogy of the family published in 1905, Walter Merryman of Harpswell, Maine, and His Descendants by the Rev. Charles Nelson Sinnett, John’s grandfather Michael Merryman was a son of Walter Merryman, the first of the family at Harpswell.

John was the second of six children, following his brother Enos (born 1807) and followed by Galen, Mary Jane, Fanny and Robert S. (born between 1810 and 1825). The Brunswick birth records name Walter and Hannah as the parents of all six, and the state death records name them for Galen and Robert, who both died at Brunswick in 1892. The 1905 genealogy records that his elder brother Enos married Hannah McManus, a sister of John’s own wife, so that two Merryman brothers had married two daughters of the same McManus household. It adds that Captain Enos died in New York City in 1851 of smallpox, while acting as keeper of a ship. A Maine death record for Hannah C. McManus Merriman, who died at Brunswick in 1899, names her parents as Robert McManus and Eleanor Coombs, the same couple the genealogy gives for John’s wife.

Marriage and family

He married Eleanor C. McManus (1809–1891) in about 1827, when he was about eighteen. She was the daughter of Robert McManus and Eleanor Coombs. The couple had ten children, born between 1829 and 1854. Their eldest daughter, Hannah Ellen, died in January 1844 at the age of fourteen, and a daughter born in 1848 was given the same name. The second Hannah Ellen also died young and unmarried; the gravestone gives 1867 and the 1905 genealogy gives October 1869.

The 1850 census of Brunswick lists John, then 41, as a mariner. His household held Eleanor and eight of the children, including William Simpson, then ten, as well as Eleanor’s father, Robert McManus, a farmer aged 85. The 1905 genealogy records that their son Nathaniel went to California in 1850 and died a miner at Baker City, Oregon, in August 1870. Their daughter Augusta married a sea captain, Peleg Curtiss, and their daughter Frances married John Henry Woodside in 1853. When Frances died a widow at Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1903, her death return named her parents as John Merryman and Ellen McManus, both born at Brunswick.

By 1870 the census called him a farmer at Brunswick, with real estate worth $5,000 and personal property worth $1,625. Living with him were Eleanor, their youngest daughter Linda, then 16, and their daughter Lydia, then 25, along with a ship master named Charles Merryman, aged 35. The 1905 genealogy gives Lydia’s first husband as Charles Spencer Merryman, who died at Callao, Peru. Lydia later married Rufus P. Tapley, a judge of Saco, Maine.

Death

John Merryman remained at Brunswick, where the censuses of 1860, 1870 and 1880 find him. He died there on 27 February 1891, at the age of 82, and was buried in Riverside Cemetery. Eleanor died on 29 March 1891 at Saco, where their daughter Lydia lived.

Notes

The 1905 genealogy gives his birth as 5 October 1808. The Riverside Cemetery record and online memorials give 4 October 1807 instead. His ages in the censuses of 1850 (41) and 1870 (61) fit 1808 better, and the family record keeps 1808. As printed, the genealogy dates Lydia’s second marriage, to Tapley, ten months before the death of her first husband, so at least one of those two dates contains an error. The genealogy gives the birth of his youngest brother Robert as 22 April 1822; the Brunswick birth record and his death record both give 1825, which is the year used here.