♂Richard Thayer

Richard Thayer (baptised 2 August 1562) was a man of Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, England, whose baptism the parish clerk entered in Latin under the name “Ricardus Tawier”. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Richard Thayer.

Thornbury

He was baptized at Thornbury on 2 August 1562: “Ricardus Tawier baptizatus erat secunda die Augusti”. In keeping with the practice of that register, the clerk named the child’s three godparents and not his parents. He is said to have been a son of Johannes Tawier and his wife Mary.

He is said to have married first, about 1585, a woman named Ann, who died in 1590; an “An Tawier” was buried at Thornbury on 10 November that year. No children of that marriage are recorded. His son Thomas Thayer was born in 1596, six years after Ann’s death, so the mother of his sons Thomas and Richard was most likely a later wife whose name is not known. Both sons are said to have crossed to New England and settled at Braintree, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W.

Lines of descent

Both of his lines to Nancy Jane Blanchard run through his son Richard, his grandson Richard and his great-grandson Nathaniel Thayer (1658–1728), down to Mary Thayer (1770–1827). Two of Mary’s grandchildren, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), married each other, so their son Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908) descended from Richard Thayer through both parents.

Notes

The 1922 column

His place in the family rests on a genealogy column printed in the Boston Evening Transcript in 1922. It gives his birth as 2 August 1562 at Thornbury, which is the date of the baptism in the register, and makes him the father of the emigrants Richard and Thomas Thayer, Thomas baptized at Thornbury on 16 August 1596. The same column names his parents as Johannes Tawier, living in 1584, and Mary, who died on 20 April 1611, and gives his first marriage, to Ann, about 1585.

The Thornbury register of these years names godparents, never parents, so it cannot test any of this. Several Tawier households were baptizing children at Thornbury in the early 1560s, and the register has a second Ricardus Tawier, baptized on 6 April 1565. The column’s choice of the 1562 child is its own.

Name

The family name appears as Tawier in the Latin register of the 1560s, as Tayer in the English entries of the 1620s and 1640s, and as Thaire and Thayer in New England.

Thornbury in 1625 and 1640

When his grandson Richard was baptized at Thornbury on 10 February 1624/5, the first of the three witnesses named was a Richard Tayer; he may have been this man, but the entry gives no more. The register also has a Richard Tayer who married a Joane on 29 June 1640 and a Richard Tayer who was buried on 29 November 1640. Neither was his son Richard, whose wife Dorothy was still living on both dates. They may have been this Richard, then in his late seventies, but the register does not say.