♂John Tawier

John Tawier (buried 11 February 1561) was a man of Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, England, in the first years of the reign of Elizabeth I. He was the twelfth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Johannes Tawier.

His birth, his parents and his trade are not known. He and his wife Constance are the earliest of the Thornbury Tawiers from whom the Thayer family is traced, and Johannes Tawier is said to have been their son. John was buried at Thornbury on 11 February 1561, and Constance followed him on 19 March 1561/2.

Lines of descent

Both lines to Nancy Jane Blanchard run through their son Johannes Tawier and his son Richard Thayer (baptized 1562), whose descendants carried the name, written Tayer and later Thayer. The two lines meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), both descended from John and Constance.

Notes

The 1922 column

The family link rests on a genealogy column printed in the Boston Evening Transcript^W in 1922, which traces the Thayers back from Thornbury and names John and Constance as the parents of Johannes Tawier. The column goes no further back than this couple. The Thornbury register of the 1560s names a child’s godparents, not the parents, so it cannot test the link; the two burials themselves are in the register.

Name and date

The index of the register gives his burial entry as “Johes Cabrier”; “Johes” is the usual Latin shortening of Johannes, the form of John used in the register, and the entry is taken to be his. Constance’s entry is indexed “Constans Tawier”.

Under the Old Style calendar^W the English year then began on 25 March, so Constance’s March burial is written 1561/2. The index gives the year 1561 for John’s burial as well. If that is the register’s own year, his burial on 11 February fell in 1561/2 by modern reckoning, five weeks before hers, rather than a year earlier; his date is given here as 11 February 1561.