♂Nicholas Blanchard

Nicholas Blanchard (26 July 1766 – 2 March 1849) was a Weymouth-born man, recorded there as Blancher, who in 1801 settled his father’s estate with his brother-in-law and later moved with his family to Maine, first to Pittston and afterwards to the Freeman and Kingfield district. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, through his sons Noah Blanchard (1797–1875) and Alexander Blanchard (1799–1850).

Early life

Nicholas was born at Weymouth, Massachusetts, on 26 July 1766, the eldest child of Nicholas Blanchard (1736–1801) and his wife Sarah, who had married at Weymouth the year before. The town’s birth register enters him as “Nicholas, s. Nicholas and Sarah”, under the spelling Blancher that the town and church records use for the family throughout. He was baptized at the Second Church of Christ in Weymouth on 27 November 1768, when he was two, on the day his parents renewed their covenant with the church. He had a sister Sarah, born in 1769, a brother Noah, born in 1777, and two sisters named Cloe, the first baptized in 1774 and the second in 1785, after the first had evidently died young. His brother Noah died in September 1791, in his fifteenth year.

Marriage and family

On 22 September 1789 Nicholas married Mary Thayer (1770–1827) at Weymouth. The town recorded the marriage under both surnames, calling him “Nicholas Jr.”; the church register spelled the name Blancher. The “Jr.” marked him off from his father, who was still living, and the town clerks used it for him until the 1800 census, which lists “Nicholas Blanchard Jr.” at Weymouth. That same summer “Nicholas Blanchard Jun.” was one of the sixty-four original proprietors of the Social Library of the South Parish of Weymouth, whose rules were adopted on 25 August 1800; the shares cost fifty cents each, and the record book, as the 1923 history of Weymouth prints it, names him among the subscribers.

The couple’s first six children were born at Weymouth. Leonard, Belinda, Mary and Matilda were baptized there between 1791 and 1795 (a history of Weymouth calls the child of 1795 Martha, where the baptismal register reads Matilda), and Noah in July 1797, named for the brother Nicholas had lost six years before. Alexander, the sixth, was born at Weymouth on 22 December 1799; his birth does not appear in the town’s printed register, but when he died there in 1850 the town’s death register named his father as “Niclas Blanchard”, which ties him to this family by a record. The baptisms name only the father, and Mary Thayer is named as the mother by the same history of Weymouth, which gives the family thirteen children in all; she is the only wife recorded for Nicholas.

The other seven were born between 1801 and 1811: Sarah in 1801, Allen in 1802, Nancy in 1804, the twins Ira and Eliza in 1807, Lydia in 1809 and a son Nicholas in 1811. Alexander was therefore the sixth of thirteen, not the youngest.

His father’s estate

His father died at Weymouth on 29 January 1801 without a will. On 5 February 1801 the Norfolk County probate court appointed two administrators: Nicholas, and Demetrius Thayer of Braintree, the husband of his sister Sarah. The account was settled on 5 April 1803, when the court divided the balance of $657.65 among the widow, who took one third, and the children: Nicholas, “Sarah Thayer, wife of Demetrius Thayer”, and the administrator of Cloe, who had died since her father. Nicholas also administered his sister Cloe’s estate, on the same day. The order of distribution names Nicholas outright as a son of the elder Nicholas, which confirms the parentage given in the town’s birth register.

Maine

A history of Weymouth published in 1923 says the family “removed from Weymouth to Pittston, Me., about 1800”, and that the eldest son Leonard settled at Pittston and a daughter, Mary, married a man of that town. The move is not otherwise documented, and the 1800 census still lists Nicholas Jr. at Weymouth. The family later reached the Freeman and Kingfield district, then still part of Massachusetts. Freeman had been incorporated in 1803; Kingfield, settled about 1806 as a plantation of the Bingham Purchase^W, was incorporated in 1816.

By March 1816, when his son Noah married, a Knapp family genealogy called Noah “of Kingfield”, and the same history of Weymouth has a daughter, Belinda, marrying a Trask of Kingfield. A daughter, Nancy, married William Barnes at Kingfield on 1 June 1828, and a gravestone at Lincoln, Maine, records her death on 1 March 1850. By 1830 Nicholas, then about sixty-three, was keeping his own household at Freeman, with the homes of his sons Alexander and Ira on either side of his.

That history records that Mary died at Freeman on 28 February 1827. Nicholas died at Freeman on 2 March 1849, at the age of 82, about twenty-two years after Mary, and was buried in North Freeman Cemetery. The date and the burial come from two transcriptions of his gravestone there; no legible photograph of the stone has been found.

His sons Noah and Alexander both settled at Freeman, and their children married each other: Noah’s eldest son, Joseph Knapp Blanchard, married his first cousin Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard, Alexander’s daughter. Their descendants, the line to Nancy Jane Blanchard among them, therefore trace back to Nicholas and Mary through two of their sons.

Lines of descent

The two lines run through his sons Noah and Alexander and meet again one generation later, in the marriage of his grandchildren Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885), Noah’s son, and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), Alexander’s daughter. Their son Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908) descended from Nicholas through both parents, and from Wesley the descent to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs as one, through George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975).

Notes

A published town history names “a Mr. Blanchard from Weymouth, Massachusetts” as the first settler of Kingfield, about 1806. The date and the town fit this family, but the man is not named, and no deed, census or petition has yet tied the claim to Nicholas.

A printed descendancy chart made Mary Thayer a daughter of James Thayer and Deborah Arnold of Braintree, which would give the family a descent from the Mayflower passengers John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, but the published Thayer genealogy of 1874 and the Braintree records list no Mary among that couple’s children, and the connection has been withdrawn. She was in fact the daughter of Noah and Mary Thayer of Braintree, born there on 2 January 1770; a history of Weymouth published in 1923 gives her birthplace as Braintree and her age at death as 58. The date long given for her birth, 3 January 1769, comes from that history and is a day and a year off the town record.

The seven children born after 1800 rest on the 1923 history alone, apart from Nancy’s marriage and gravestone; no record has yet been found for Sarah, who is listed there only as having married. Indexes of Maine births list children named Eliza, Ira, Lydia and Nicholas under a father Nicholas Blanchard; those entries have not been examined, and the same given names occur in another Weymouth Blanchard family. The 1923 history gives his death as 22 March 1848, “aged 72 years”, with no place. That age cannot fit a man born on 26 July 1766, who would have been 81 in March 1848, and the gravestone transcriptions give 1849. Some online compilations give other death dates, in 1846 and between 1848 and 1850, and one gives him a wife named Ruth; that entry marks itself as probably incorrect, and no record supports it.

Baptism

The baptism is in the church book of the Second Church of Christ in Weymouth, printed in The Genealogical Advertiser, vol. 2 no. 4 (December 1899), p. 116: “Nicholas Blancher & Wife renewed their Covenant. & their Son Nicholas Baptized Novber. 27. 1768.” Chamberlain’s History of Weymouth (1923), vol. 3 p. 103, gives the same date. The church book does not name the wife; she is identified by the town’s birth register, which names his mother as Sarah.