♀Mary Thayer

Mary Thayer (2 January 1770 – 28 February 1827) was a Braintree-born wife and mother who moved with her family to the Maine frontier, and whose grandchildren by two of her sons later married each other. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, through her sons Noah Blanchard (1797–1875) and Alexander Blanchard (1799–1850).

Early life

She was born at Braintree, Massachusetts, on 2 January 1770; the town’s register records “Mary Thayer, the Daughter of Noah Thayer & Mary his wife”. Braintree was full of Thayers, and which of the town’s several men named Noah was her father has not been settled. Her mother’s maiden name is not established either: an online family tree calls her Mary Lyon, and that September the church in neighbouring Weymouth baptised a “Mary, grand d. Mr. Lions”, which may be this child.

Marriage and family

On 22 September 1789, at Weymouth, she married Nicholas Blanchard (1766–1849), called “Nicholas Jr.” in the town record, which says they were both of the town. The couple had six known children: Leonard, Belinda, Mary and Matilda, baptised at Weymouth between 1791 and 1795, Noah, born in 1797, and Alexander, born in 1799. The family later settled in the Kingfield and Freeman district of Maine, where she died at Freeman on 28 February 1827. Her gravestone no longer survives, but a history of Weymouth published in 1923 recorded her birthplace as Braintree and her age at death as 58.

Lines of descent

The two lines run through her sons Noah and Alexander, who both settled at Freeman, and meet again a generation later: Noah’s eldest son, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885), married his first cousin Elizabeth Thayer Blanchard (1825–1884), Alexander’s daughter, who carried her grandmother’s surname as a middle name. Their son Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908) descended from Mary Thayer through both parents, and from him the descent runs to Nancy Jane Blanchard.

Notes

The 1923 history of Weymouth gives her birth as 3 January 1769, a day and a year from the town record; the family’s long-standing date comes from it. For a time she was taken to be the Weymouth-born “Molle”, a daughter of Obadiah Thayer and Hannah Beal, born in 1762, whom a Thayer genealogy of 1874 marries to a Nicholas Blanchard; her age at death rules that out, since that Mary would have been 65.

A printed descendancy chart compiled in 1994 made her a daughter of James Thayer and Deborah Arnold of Braintree, which would have given the family a descent from the Mayflower passengers John Alden and Priscilla Mullins. The published Thayer genealogy and the Braintree records list no Mary among that couple’s children, and the standard five-generation genealogy of the Alden family shows no Alden descent through her family. The family’s real Mayflower descents come through other lines.