♂Theodore Blanchard

Theodore Blanchard (2 May 1902 – 5 February 1979) was an American stockbroker and statistician who served more than twenty years in the United States Navy and retired as a rear admiral in the Naval Reserve; he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Late in life he and his wife introduced his widowed brother Kenneth to the woman Kenneth married in 1969. He was the uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the youngest brother of her father, Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975).

Early life

Theodore Blanchard was born on 2 May 1902 at Haverhill, Essex County, Massachusetts, the youngest of the four children of Dr. George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Anna Walker Merryman (1869–1942). He grew up in the Highlands of Orange County, New York, where his father practised medicine: the censuses of 1910 and 1920 and the New York state census of 1925 all record him in his parents’ household there.

Marriage and career

On 13 April 1926, in the Bronx, New York City, he took out a marriage licence with Dorothy M. Heidenreich (1903–1998), a native of New York City. In 1930 the couple were renting an apartment on Florence Street in Mamaroneck, Westchester County, and he was working as a broker in stocks and bonds. By 1940 they owned a house on Seacord Road in New Rochelle, and the census of that year describes him as a college graduate employed as a statistician in the copper wire industry. His father’s obituary in The New York Times in January 1939 had already named him as “Theodore of New Rochelle”. The couple had two children, a daughter and a son, both born in New Jersey in the late 1930s.

Naval service

He entered the United States Navy on 29 September 1938, at the age of 36, and was discharged on 29 May 1959. In 1940, eighteen months after he entered, the census still records him in his civilian post as a statistician, and a newspaper notice of 1960 gives his rank as Rear Admiral, United States Naval Reserve, retired. The surviving records do not describe what he did in the Navy during the Second World War or after it. His brother Kenneth’s obituaries of 1975 call him “Adm. Theodore Blanchard”, and his gravestone confirms the rank of rear admiral.

Later years and death

In the early 1960s the family lived at Briarcliff Manor, Westchester County. By the late 1960s he and Dorothy had settled at Deerfield Beach, Florida. In March 1969 the local newspaper, reporting that Kenneth and his new wife, Jean Young, were home from their honeymoon cruise, named “Mr. and Mrs. Ted Blanchard of Deerfield” as the matchmakers who had introduced the couple at a dinner party. Kenneth had been widowed the year before. The notice shows that the Florida side of the family knew of the marriage and in fact brought it about, even though Kenneth’s hometown obituary in Illinois later named no surviving wife.

He was still living at Deerfield Beach when Kenneth died in 1975. Theodore Blanchard died on 5 February 1979 at San Diego, California. He was buried on 6 April 1979 in Section 11 of Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, under a stone that reads “Rear Admiral, United States Navy”. Dorothy died on 28 May 1998 and is named on the same stone as his “beloved wife”.

Notes

The 1920 census gives his birthplace as Maine, the state his parents came from; the censuses of 1910, 1930 and 1940 and the Social Security death index give Massachusetts, and the family record places his birth at Haverhill. The index of his service records gives the dates of his enlistment and discharge but no rank. The rank comes from his gravestone and from newspaper notices of 1960 and 1962.