♂Robert Watson Blanchard

Robert Watson Blanchard (10 March 1934 – 30 December 2006) was the only son of a New Jersey pediatrician, who married in Canada, at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, in June 1956, while serving as an ensign in the United States Navy. He was the younger brother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), and the youngest of the three children of Dr. Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975) and Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968).

Early life

Robert Watson Blanchard was born on 10 March 1934 at Orange, Essex County, New Jersey, and grew up in South Orange, West Orange and the neighboring towns of northern New Jersey, where his father practiced medicine. He shared his middle name with his maternal grandfather, Sereno Watson Schneck, a physician in Mount Carmel, Illinois. A high-school yearbook of the Orange area shows an “R. Blanchard” on the football team, and the 1950 census found him at sixteen, a student living at home with his parents and his elder sister Barbara. A University of Illinois yearbook of about 1953–54 shows a Robert Blanchard among the sports staff of the student newspaper, the Daily Illini.

Marriage and later life

On Saturday, 23 June 1956, he was married at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake. The Niagara Falls Review reported the wedding two days later, naming the groom as “Ensign Robert Watson Blanchard, U.S.N.”, son of Dr. and Mrs. G. Kenneth Blanchard of Cheyenne, Wyoming, where his parents were then living; the reception was held at the Park Hotel on Clifton Hill, and the couple honeymooned at Sea Island, Georgia. The couple had five children.

When his father died in March 1975, the obituary in the Mount Carmel newspaper listed “a son, Robert of Birmingham, Michigan”, among the survivors. By December 1991 he was living at Campobello, Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and he remained there for the rest of his life.

Death

Robert Watson Blanchard died on 30 December 2006, four months after his sister Nancy Jane. The Social Security death index gives the date and records Campobello as his last residence; the place of his death is not recorded. No obituary, death notice or grave memorial for him has been found.

Notes

He is not to be confused with his elder cousin Robert Wesley Blanchard (1926–1980), the son of his father’s brother William Wesley Blanchard, who was superintendent of the Portland Public Schools in Oregon.