♂William Martimore

William Martimore (buried 1 September 1626) was a man of Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, who married Margaret Groome there on 21 April 1623 and was buried there on 1 September 1626. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Dorothy Martimore.

Thornbury

He was probably the William Mortimer of Thornbury, hooper, whose will of 1626 is held among the Gloucester diocesan probate records; a hooper made and fitted the hoops that bound casks and barrels. By a first wife, whose name is not known, he was most likely the father of Dorothy Martimore.

He married Margaret Groome at Thornbury on 21 April 1623, and a year later, on 5 April 1624, Dorothy married Richard Thayer, written “Richard Tayer” in the register, in the same church. When a Richard Tayer, most likely their son, was baptized there on 10 February 1624/5, the register named his witnesses only: “Richard Tayer Willm Martimore & Bridgett Tayar”. The William Martimore among them was perhaps the boy’s grandfather. William was buried at Thornbury on 1 September 1626.

Lines of descent

Both of his lines to Nancy Jane Blanchard run through his daughter Dorothy, her son Richard and her 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 William Martimore through both parents.

Notes

His family

That Dorothy was his daughter comes from a genealogy column in the Boston Evening Transcript in 1922, which makes her the daughter of William Mortimer of Thornbury and his first wife, and has William marrying a second wife, Margaret Groome, on 21 April 1623 and dying about 1626. The column’s source was most likely his will, catalogued under the name William Mortimer of Thornbury, hooper, which is also the only record of his trade. The Thornbury register of those years names godparents, never parents, so it does not show whose daughter Dorothy was, and its entry of the 1623 marriage gives the bride as “Margaret” only.

The same column makes William a son of a John Mortimer who died in 1615. That descent is unproven, and it sits badly with the Thornbury register, where a John Martimore married a Jone on 8 November 1591, too late to be the father of a man whose daughter married in 1624.