♀Sarah Hovey Thayer

Sarah Hovey Thayer (3 November 1802 – 24 May 1840) was a Weymouth, Massachusetts, woman who married her first cousin, Alexander Blanchard, in 1839 and died eight months later at his home in Freeman, Maine. She was the second wife of Alexander Blanchard (1799–1850), a third great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), and through her mother a granddaughter of Nicholas Blanchard (1736–1801) and Sarah Hovey, fifth great-grandparents of Nancy Jane Blanchard.

Family

Sarah was born at Weymouth on 3 November 1802. The town’s register enters her birth as “Sarah Hovey, d. Capt. Demetrius and Sarah”. Her father was Demetrius Thayer of Braintree, and her mother was Sarah Blanchard, born at Weymouth in 1769, a daughter of Nicholas Blanchard and Sarah Hovey. The link to the Blanchards comes from the settlement of her grandfather’s estate. Nicholas Blanchard died without a will early in 1801, and on 5 February 1801 letters of administration went to Nicholas Blanchard and Demetrius Thayer of Braintree. When the Norfolk County probate court ordered it divided on 5 April 1803, it named among his children “Sarah Thayer, wife of Demetrius Thayer”. Her given names reproduce in full the maiden name of her grandmother, Sarah Hovey, whose marriage to Nicholas Blanchard is recorded at Weymouth in 1765.

Marriage and death

On 29 September 1839, at the age of thirty-six, Sarah married at Weymouth, where the register records “Thayer, Sarah H. and Capt. Alexander Blanchard of Freeman, Me.” Alexander was the son of her mother’s brother Nicholas Blanchard (1766–1849), so the two were first cousins, both grandchildren of Nicholas Blanchard and Sarah Hovey. He was a widower with a daughter, Elizabeth, from his first marriage.

Sarah went with her husband to Freeman, in Franklin County, Maine, and died there on 24 May 1840, eight months after the wedding. Weymouth nevertheless entered her death in its own register, under her married surname among the Blanchards: “Sarah H., ch. Capt. Demetrius Thayer and Sarah B., May 24, 1840, a. 37 y. 6 m., in Freeman, Me.” The printed entry cites a gravestone record. The age it gives agrees to the month with her birth entry of 1802, and the parents it names are the same. No children of the marriage are recorded.