♂Walter Merriman III

Walter Merriman (4 April 1785 – 7 March 1867) was a farmer of Rocky Hill in Brunswick, Maine, who married his own first cousin, Hannah Merryman. He was the third great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son John Merryman (1808–1891).

Early life

He was born on 4 April 1785 at Harpswell, on the coast of what was then the District of Maine, part of Massachusetts; Maine became a separate state in 1820. His parents were Michael Merryman (1760–1848) and Mary Bishop (1756–1832). The Congregational church at Harpswell baptized him on 25 December 1785, when he was eight months old; its register names his father as Michal Meryman, the spelling the register uses, and his mother as Mary. He was the eldest of the seven children born to them at Harpswell between 1785 and 1799; his brothers and sisters were James, Mary, Michael, Abigail and two boys named Hudson, the first of whom died in childhood. The surname is spelled both Merriman and Merryman in the records, sometimes within one family.

According to a genealogy of the family published in 1905, Walter Merryman of Harpswell, Maine, and His Descendants by the Rev. Charles Nelson Sinnett, his father Michael was the fifth son of Walter Merryman, the first of the family at Harpswell, and lived on a farm at Harpswell Center where the elder Walter was said to have lived for a time. The same book records the family’s tradition that this first Walter had been kidnapped in an Irish port early in the 1700s and brought to Boston, where a Mr. Simonton of Cape Elizabeth paid his passage and taught him ship carpentry. That account is the family’s own and rests on the book.

Marriage and family

The Maine state marriage records, as indexed, show that he married Hannah Merryman (1783–1862) at Harpswell on 1 October 1805, when he was twenty and she twenty-two; the index spells their names Walter Meryman and Hannah Meryman. The 1905 genealogy gives the same day. She was a daughter of James Merryman and Hannah Blake, whom an index of the Harpswell town birth register names as her parents, and the book names James and Michael as brothers, both sons of the first Walter. The couple were therefore first cousins, and the founder of the family stands twice in the ancestry of their descendants, once through each of them. The book states the relationship in two separate chapters, but both passages come from the same compiler.

The couple settled at Rocky Hill in Brunswick, the town next to Harpswell, where the 1905 genealogy describes Walter as a farmer. The Brunswick birth records name Walter and Hannah as the parents of six children, born between 1807 and 1825: Enos, John, Galen, Mary Jane, Fanny and Robert S., the same six the genealogy lists, although it dates Robert’s birth to 1822. Enos, the eldest, became a ship’s keeper and died of smallpox at New York City in 1851. John, the second son, became a mariner and later a farmer at Brunswick.

In 1840 the household headed by Walter at Brunswick held a man and a woman aged 50 to 60, presumably Walter and Hannah, a young man aged 15 to 20, probably their son Robert, and a woman aged 20 to 30, presumably an unmarried daughter; his sons Enos, Galen and John headed households listed just above his on the same page. The 1850 census, as indexed, shows them at Brunswick in a household that also held their son Robert, then 25; in 1860 the couple were alone, and the index reads their ages as 75 for Walter and 78 for Hannah.

Death

Hannah died at Brunswick on 7 December 1862. Walter died on 7 March 1867, at the age of 81, and was buried in Growstown Cemetery in Brunswick. He left a will with a codicil, and his son Robert S. Merryman, the executor it named, presented it for probate at the Cumberland County probate court at Portland in December 1867. The text of the will is not known.

Notes

The family record gives his death as 7 March 1867; the 1905 genealogy prints 7 November 1867, in two different chapters. A Portland newspaper of 16 March 1867 gives the death as 7 March, so 7 March is correct and the book’s November date is a misprint. The same paper gives his age as 82, rounding up: he was four weeks short of his eighty-second birthday. The will and codicil, presented by Robert S. Merryman as executor, appear in the probate notices of the Portland Daily Press of 14 December 1867. His parentage rests on the 1905 genealogy and also on the index of the Harpswell town birth register, which records his birth on 4 April 1785 with his father Michael Merryman and a mother surnamed Bishop. Hannah’s own parents are now named by the same index, so the first-cousin relationship rests on the book for the descent of James and Michael from the first Walter, although the christening index names a Walter Merriman as the father of both brothers. An older Walter Merryman, his uncle, also lived at Harpswell in the 1790s, so records of that name from before about 1810 generally refer to the uncle, not to him.