♂Joseph Knapp Blanchard

Joseph Knapp Blanchard (16 June 1820 – 16 September 1885) was a Maine farmer who became a grocer and property owner at Lewiston in Androscoggin County, and spent most of his adult life there. He was the great-great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), Wesley’s son George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939), and George’s son Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975).

Early life

Joseph was a son of Noah Blanchard (1797–1875), who was born at Weymouth, Massachusetts, and Polly Knapp (1798–1863). His father’s will of 11 June 1874 names him among “my other children”, with a bequest of five hundred dollars, and Joseph signed the petition to have it proved in December 1875. His middle name was his mother’s surname. Through her he was a grandson of Joseph Knapp, a patriot of the Revolution, and in 1942 his great-grandson Kenneth Blanchard traced his descent from that patriot through Joseph in an application to the Sons of the American Revolution.

The application and a cemetery index agree on 16 June 1820 as his birth date. His birthplace is uncertain: the cemetery index gives Readfield in Kennebec County, while two family charts give Kingfield and Freeman in Franklin County. No birth record has been found, and the Readfield town record’s index and the family records entered there in the years around 1820 show no Blanchard family.

Marriage and family

Joseph married his first cousin, Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard, a daughter of his father’s brother Alexander Blanchard. Marriages between first cousins were legal in Maine and not unusual in the rural towns, where families were large and neighbours were often kin. She was born on 26 September 1825, probably at Freeman. A family chart dates the marriage to 12 April 1840, but no record of it has been found, and that date would make her only fourteen. The records name her only as “Elizabeth T.”; later sources expand the initial to Thayer, and a family chart to Trueworthy.

The couple had five children, born between 1841 and 1868: Adaline, Wesley, Frank Leroy, Minnie and Ida Alice. In 1850 the family lived at Mount Vernon in Kennebec County, where the census shows Joseph, aged thirty, as a farmer whose real estate was valued at $1,800. A Massachusetts partition petition of 1857 still describes him as of Readfield, a neighboring town. By 1860 they had moved to Lewiston, where Joseph registered for the Civil War draft in July 1863, and they stayed in Androscoggin County for the rest of his life. Adaline died in 1861, aged about twenty. Minnie married Dr. Ernest Russell in 1880. Frank left Maine for New York City, where he married in 1887 and lived until his death in 1936.

Lewiston

By 1880 Joseph was a grocer at Lewiston; the census index gives his age as fifty-nine. A county history published in 1891 lists him among the city’s councilmen for 1878, 1879 and 1880.

He also owned a good deal of Lewiston property. His will names a brick block at the corner of Middle and Main streets, part of which his son Wesley then occupied as a grocery store, along with several building lots, a homestead on Main Street and the Dolin House on Middle Street.

Death

Elizabeth died on 6 April 1884. Joseph made his will in September 1885, the month he died, and a cemetery index gives 16 September 1885 as the date of his death, which agrees with the Sons of the American Revolution application. No death record under his name has been found in the indexed Maine vital records, though the city of Lewiston was already recording deaths at the time. He was buried in Riverside Cemetery at Lewiston, aged sixty-five.

The will divided the brick block between his sons Wesley and Frank, and gave them the other Middle Street and Lowell Street property singly or in common. The Main Street homestead passed to his daughter Lizzie Mariah Russell, the Minnie of the family record, and a Pierce Street lot to his youngest daughter, Alice. The residue went to the two daughters, and the will also names the Pierce Street Methodist Church.

He left twenty-five dollars each to his grandchildren George, Edith and Channing Blanchard and Bessie Russell, and fifty dollars to a Cora Blanchard “as a reward for her interest during my wife’s sickness”. Wesley and his son-in-law Dr. Russell were the executors. Ida Alice died at Lewiston on 29 October 1900. Her own will survives, and the state’s record of her death names her parents as Joseph K. and Elizabeth T. Blanchard.