♂William Wesley Blanchard

William Wesley Blanchard (5 December 1895 – 1 April 1973) was an American insurance salesman from Orange County, New York, who served in the United States Marine Corps in the First World War; he landed in France with his battalion on 10 November 1918, the day before the Armistice. He was the uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the eldest brother of her father, Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975).

Early life

William Wesley Blanchard was born on 5 December 1895 at Haverhill, Essex County, Massachusetts, the eldest of the four children of Dr. George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Anna Walker Merryman (1869–1942), both natives of Maine. In 1900 the family was living at 63 West 54th Street in Manhattan, where his father worked as a physician, and from 1899 his father practised medicine at Highland Falls, in the Highlands of Orange County, New York; the census of 1910 records William there, aged 14, with his parents, his brothers Kenneth and Theodore and his sister Frances. The census of 1940 records that he had four years of college. A cemetery memorial adds that he attended the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas in 1913–14; that rests on the memorial alone.

The Marine Corps

On 6 August 1918 he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps at Highland Falls, and he trained at Parris Island, South Carolina. His service record states that he went to France with Company B of the 9th Separate Battalion, arriving on 10 November 1918. The fighting ended with the Armistice the next morning, so his time overseas, which lasted until 21 July 1919, fell almost entirely after the war. He was promoted to private first class on 20 June 1919, returned to Quantico, Virginia, at the end of July, and was discharged on 13 August 1919 with his character rated “excellent”. His brother Kenneth enlisted in the Army sixteen days after him, on 22 August 1918.

Marriage and career

On 4 June 1925, in Orange County, he married Rilda Jane Reissman; city directories and the draft card of 1942 call her Relda J. Blanchard. The couple stayed in Orange County at first. In 1930 William was head of a household on River Road at Highland Falls, working as an insurance salesman, and his wife’s parents, Frederick and Marie J. Reissmann, lived with them. By 1937 they had moved to Newburgh, where the city directory lists him as an insurance agent at 15 Roosevelt Place, and his father’s obituary in The New York Times in January 1939 named him as “William W. of Newburgh”.

In 1940 the family was renting a house at 823 Woodland in Oradell, Bergen County, New Jersey; he was then an insurance salesman, and the Reissmanns were still part of the household. The 1930 and 1940 census pages both show that the couple had one child, a son, Robert Wesley Blanchard (1926–1980), who served in the Army in 1945–46 and died at Portland, Oregon, in 1980. When William registered for the draft in 1942, at the age of 46, he was living at 40 Bogert Place in Westwood, New Jersey, and working for the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, the aircraft manufacturer, at its plant at Caldwell, Essex County.

Death

He later moved to Florida. He died on 1 April 1973 in Charlotte County, aged 77, with his last residence at Punta Gorda, and was buried at Restlawn Memorial Gardens in Port Charlotte.

Notes

His wife’s given name is written Rilda in the family record, Relda in the 1937 directory, on the 1942 draft card and in the 1930 census, and Ralda in the 1940 census. The cemetery memorial that gives his Texas schooling also links him to a father with the years 1869–1942; his father was born in 1868 and died in 1939, and 1942 is the year his mother died.