♂Richard Thayer

Richard Thayer (living 1648) was a man of Boston, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, who in 1648 sold his house and land at Braintree to his son Richard. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son Richard Thayer.

Thornbury

He is said to have been baptized at Thornbury on 5 April 1601. He was probably a son of the Richard Thayer who was baptized at Thornbury in August 1562. Richard Tayer, as the parish clerk wrote his name, married Dorothy Martimore at Thornbury on 5 April 1624, and compiled genealogies take him to be the Richard Thayer of Boston. A Richard Tayer baptized there on 10 February 1624/5 was entered in the register with his witnesses only: “Richard Tayer Willm Martimore & Bridgett Tayar”.

Dorothy was buried at Thornbury on 17 January 1640/1, written “Dorathie Tayer” in the register. Richard is said to have crossed to New England with eight children about that time and to have settled at Braintree in 1641.

Boston and Braintree

By 1648 he was living at Boston, while his son lived at Braintree. On the fifth day of the seventh month 1648, “Richard Thaire the Elder” of Boston sold to “Rich: Thaire of Braintry sonn of the sajd Richard of Boston”, for forty pounds, a dwelling house, an orchard and four acres on the Monatiquot river at Braintree. The sale took in other Braintree land as well, which he had bought from Moses Paine, John Niles and Dermon Downing. Under the Old Style^W reckoning of the time the year began in March, so the seventh month was September and the deed is dated 5 September 1648.

Lines of descent

Both of his lines to Nancy Jane Blanchard run through his son Richard and his 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

Thornbury and Boston

The deed of 1648 is the record that ties Richard Thayer of Boston to his son at Braintree. That the Boston man is the Richard Tayer who married at Thornbury in 1624 rests on the compiled genealogies. A Braintree Thayer genealogy makes him the emigrant from Thornbury who came to New England with eight children early in 1641. A history of Bridgewater published in 1840 says that he “arrived in this country from England a. 1640, and settled in Braintree 1641, with 8 children”, Richard the first of them. A dictionary of New England marriages gives his first wife as Dorothy Mortimer, married at Thornbury on 5 April.

The Thornbury 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. Dorothy was still alive on both dates, so neither man was her husband.

Baptism at Thornbury

A printed compilation of Thornbury parish register entries for the Thayer family, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register of 1906, dates his baptism 5 April 1601 and names godfathers Richard Dimery and Nicholas Tayer and godmother Elizabeth Griffing. The transcribers’ footnote hedges on whether the child is the emigrant; the printed text on page 285 states the identification flatly.

His father

The father named here, Richard Thayer, baptized at Thornbury on 2 August 1562 (“Ricardus Tawier baptizatus erat secunda die Augusti”), comes from a genealogy column in the Boston Evening Transcript in 1922, which makes him the father of the emigrants Richard and Thomas. The Thornbury register of those years names godparents, never parents, so the entry itself does not say whose son the child was, and the register has a second Ricardus Tawier baptized on 6 April 1565.

The 1624/5 baptism

The register entry, dated 10 February 1624/5 in the Old Style count, names witnesses and no parents. A 1991 Blanchard and Merryman family genealogy gives the son Richard’s baptism at Thornbury as 10 February 1625, and a compiled ancestor chart gives the same date for a son Richard born there. The identification of the register entry as that son rests on those compilations; the entry itself does not name him.

Later life

The dictionary of New England marriages gives him a second wife, Jane, the widow of John Parker, married by 1652 at Boston, and has him living after 1668. A later sale of land at Braintree, dated 10 April 1668, has his son describe it as “bought by mee of Richard Thayer my ffather deceased”, so he had died before that day, at Braintree.