♂William Merryman

William Merryman (4 February 1785 – 12 May 1859) was a man born at Harpswell, Cumberland, Maine. He was the third great-grand-uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the brother of Hannah Merryman (1783–1862), Nancy Jane’s third great-grandmother.

Early life

William was born at Harpswell on 4 February 1785, according to the 1905 genealogy Walter Merryman of Harpswell, Maine, and His Descendants by the Rev. Charles Nelson Sinnett. Harpswell then lay in the District of Maine^W, part of Massachusetts. The book makes him the fourth of the eight children of James Merryman (1756–1825) and Hannah Blake (1757–1821). The federal census of 1790 counted two boys under sixteen in his father’s household, a count that fits William and his elder brother John, the only sons the book gives the family at that date.

Marriage and family

On 12 July 1809, the genealogy says, William married Miriam Stover, who was born on 21 January 1787 and was a daughter of Capt. John Stover and Dolly Allen. Four of the eight Merryman children married into the Stover family, the same book says: William, his brother John, and his sisters Fanny and Lydia.

The genealogy gives William and Miriam five children: David, Wanton, Daniel, Emeline and John. It calls David, Wanton and Daniel captains, and traces the first three sons’ own families through the later nineteenth century at Harpswell.

Death

The genealogy gives Miriam’s death as 9 January 1856. On the genealogy’s dates, William outlived her by more than three years, and it gives his own death on 12 May 1859, at the age of seventy-four.

Notes

William’s birth date appears in the 1905 genealogy, which prints his chapter as the fourth of James Merryman’s eight, and in a Maine births and christenings index; the dates for Miriam and the children rest on the genealogy alone. The tree holds no marriage, census or burial record for him.