Scroll to ...Bottom List
"Susan B. Bates Blanchard"
Weymouth, 1885, January.
Died the 11th, of record the 13th.
Widowed, age 74 years, 3 months, 7 days.
Cause Pneumonia
Her survivors, giving information for the record, believed that she and both of her parents, Edward Bates and Margaret Howland, had been born at Pembroke. Her parents lie buried there, their stones still clearly readable.
HER DEATH SOURCE: "Massachusetts Deaths, 1841-1915", handwritten list, line 9. Image last archived Dec., 2014, FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-DHF3-XHZ
BIRTH NOTE: Oct. 4 is a likely birth date, calculated by subtracting her age at death from date of death. Using just the month signals it is a calculation.)
===================================
Third wife of mariner Capt. Alexander Blanchard, she would become a second mother for the younger ones among his prior children. She would bear her own children as well, with only one living to adulthood, but then dying in a Civil War year, leaving her a widow with no survivors.
MARRIAGE. Both their churches/towns recorded their intent to marry ("banns"), with the marriage following, so their marriage year as 1840 is found multiple times. Reading "banns"/intent at both places, bride's church and groom's church, in theory, gave an opportunity for prior spouses, etc., to raise objections. Prior spouses presumed dead usually were, in fact, dead, so usually no one objected. The wedding was often at the church of the bride, true for her. She called him "Alex" when filing for marriage at her own church, in Pembroke, in Plymouth County.
HER NAME. "Susan" began as a nickname for Susannah.
The Bates and Blanchard trees began intertwining when the first Susannah Bates in Weymouth married Alexander Blanchard's immigrant ancestor, Nathaniel Blanchard. His immigrant father, Thomas Blanchard, "brought over" Nathaniel at about age 7, with several brothers.
A Susannah Bicknell Bates lies buried in the same cemetery as spouse Alexander. Born in 1794, given the nickname Susan, she was of the right age to be a younger cousin or even a sister to this Susan's father. (Susan's father, Edward, was born around 1781.) Was this Susan B. a namesake for Susannah Bicknell?
HUSBAND'S GRAVESTONE. Her husband, Alexander Blanchard, died decades before Susan. As a mariner, he was better able than many to move around, to go and fro, between Maine and Massachusetts. His children across three wives can be counted like this:
Wife1, long-enough marriage to have five children, born Maine, married Maine, according to a Dudley family history, Alex's stone acts as a cenotaph, repeating the information seen in two other sources that Wife1 died in Maine.
Wife2, too-short marriage, zero children, born Weymouth, married Weymouth, reportedly died in Maine in the year after marriage. The source for the death location is not the stone stating her name, but a record book. It gave Freeman, Maine, for both her death place and for his residence at the time they married, presumedly so his first five children would not have to leave their home. We assume she is buried here in Massachusetts, but her mention on his stone could be just a cenotaph.
Wife3, this Susan, longtime marriage with four children, died Weymouth.
Made of a firmer rock than limestone, the words on Alexander's stone are clearer than seen on many gravestones of its age. His stone lists his two prior wives, Sarah Dudley, whose true stone has been found at her burial place in Maine, and Sarah Hovey Thayer, for whom a mention at his is the only stone found as of 2016.
More importantly, someone left room on the stone for his third wife, this Susan. She survived him, so would have been the one ordering his stone, asking that space be left for her "when her time came". Yet, the space for her has been left blank.
If no survivors were still local after she died in her 70s, the town would have buried her there, but would not have paid for her marker. For the moment, her burial is treated as unplaced. If we find that there were no related survivors (siblings) on her Bates side as well, we'll assume she was buried here, but that funds were exhausted, so no carving was made.
THEIR KNOWN CHILDREN; HISTORY BONUSES & FLAWS. George Walter Chamberlain, a former Weymouth school principal, wrote a history of Weymouth in the 1920s. He included the Blanchards of Weymouth and Maine. He wrote 70-90 years after the death of Alex and Wife1, so relied on a Vital Records book for old Weymouth.
Chamberlain was thorough and understood local church history, so could track families by church and not just by town, needed to make sense of early "birth records" that were collected at infant baptisms. Two town-authorized churches were built earliest, "First" for north and significantly later, "Second" for south. Then came two "union" churches, along the edges of Weymouth, as fringe areas avoided earlier began to fill-in.
Chamberlain understood that the old King's church had more members in Weymouth than normal for a strongly Puritan town. (Were their early church/chapel records of baptism and marriages burned in the American Revolution?)
In general, Methodists were initially a praying club or praying society inside the King's Church. Those in Britain were eventually kicked out of the King's Church after they took over pulpits and preached that anyone not adhering to emerging Methodist views was wrong. (Did that happen here, too? Not as much? If the Methodist clubs/societies here were more tolerant?)
Post-American Revolution, the societies not loyal to the King, yet not willing to turn Calvinist, seeing the latter as too negative in its views of human nature and free will, made their own churches. As long as First and Second Church did not declare denominations, was it possible for the early Methodists to form a society inside? Served by traveling ministers? Or...? Many in Weymouth and neighboring Pembroke would join a Methodist-Episcopalian (ME) denomination eventually, with the Methodist side more country, accordingly poorer and plainer to match farmers' pocketbooks, while the Episcopalian end was more city, better off, so could be more ornate and have more variety in services. Three Rev. Bates in the Weymouth-Pembroke area were circuit-riding minsters ("itinerant" or traveling) for the Methodist-Episcopal church. They may have been cousins to Sarah, but too many early records for her own parents have been lost to know this for certain.
Chamberlain was thorough. He listed both Alexander's known five children with first wife Sarah Dudley, plus Alexander's known four children with this third wife, Susan B. Bates, nine children total, and he named parents-in-law ("History of Weymouth", vol. 3. on and near p.110).
Chamberlain's history has a peculiarity. He relied on an older Vital Records book for Weymouth that had both a bonus and a flaw.
The bonus? More gravestones were still clear and unbroken then than now, more birth years or ages were still readable. Once stones lost readability, books like his could be consulted.
The flaw? A lack of clarity on birth source. Whenever infant baptism/birth records were missing from church and town, the town clerks substituted a gravestone's birth year. ()It was either stone-carved or, more often, calculated from age at death. Each such entry ended with an abbreviation for the stone's local graveyard. The graveyard was only way you could tell it was stone information, apart from the fact that parents' names were missing. Because the abbreviations were minimal, lots of readers did not know that they signaled a gravestone only, no birth record.
This created a false impression. People born elsewhere but who died in Weymouth were treated as born in Weymouth.
BEWARE: Weymouth's "false births" were passed up to the county/state level, in addition to "true births". How to detect? First, too many birthplaces will be given as Weymouth, especially for families that moved around.
One sign? No parent is listed. (The Weymouth infant baptizing churches ALWAYS named at least one parent, sometimes a grandparent if a child's mother died and the father was away sailing or in the military. The baptism was a commitment made in public to raise the child well, parent or a guardian's names were deemed essential.)
In practice, what does this mean? Whenever finding a birth source that says Weymouth, but that gives no names for parents, a non-Weymouth source must be found.
These could be a family history by in-laws from out-of-town or out-of-state. For these Blanchards, with Wife1's parents born in NH and herself in Maine, the source was by in-law Dean Dudley. Done while Alexander and his eldest children lived, it stated Alexander and the first children were also born in Maine, not Weymouth as many claim. It gave different towns inside Maine. It was a sign of accuracy, to not "simply assume" the same town for everyone.
Alex's last four children were by Susan. They were all infant-baptized, with at least one parent named. There is no doubt they were Weymouth births.
The childrens' names were repeated online at genealogy.com by Ward-E-Hobby, in his Blanchard tree, generally very well-done. Its main error is the same, found in other people's trees: Listing too many who died in Weymouth as also born in Weymouth.
Alexander had first married Sarah Dudley in Phillips, Franklin County, Maine, on June 30, 1822. Their five known children were born 1823-1834, all in Maine, according to Dean Dudley's book.
Alexander's last wife, Susan Bates, was not a Dudley. She and her children were not in Dudley's book. Those second children were a second family, born 1841-1846, those truly all in Weymouth. There was a seven-year gap between the two sets of children. However, some of the older set would stay with Susan and Alex, well into adulthood.
Susan named two of her children Leonard after a Blanchard uncle. Only Leonard Wesley Blanchard, her fourth child, lived to adulthood. The name Wesley is a sign of Methodism, as an early leader was John Wesley, who led a saintly life.
These three of Susan's four died as infants:
Their first Leonard Blanchard (1841-1841);
Wilbur Fiske Blanchard (1845-1846);
Sarah Wilbur Blanchard(1846-1847).
The "Vital Records of Weymouth Through 1850" book, not printed until 1910, gave measles for one, croup for another, and a third unspecified, as to cause of death. There were no vaccinations yet. If a child was already weakened by an earlier flu, a case of "croup" (diphtheria?) or measles could kill.
There may have been inexpensive "footstones" with names for the infants, instead of larger headstones. A problem? Footstones in some other local cemeteries, such as the Elm Street Cemetery in the neighboring town of Braintree, were known to have been gathered up and tossed to make machine-mowing easier.
Fiske and Wilbur were surnames re-used as middle names. They might name a mother and grandmother on Susan's side, just as Susan's middle "B" possibly stood for Bicknell, another maternal surname. We, as of 2016, have no other clues to her parents' ancestry.
===================================================
Her only child to survive through much, not all of the Civil War?
"BIRTHS"
"Blanchard (see Blanchar, Blancher, Blancherd, Blanchers, Blanchord)"
"Leonard Wesley, s. Alexander, mariner, and Susan, June 13, 1843"
Source: 1910 book, "Vital Records of Weymouth Through 1850", page 50.
===================================================
(In Progress...THIS REFERENCE SECTION WILL BE DELETED AFTER WE FIND STONES. The Elm Street Cemetery was examined by an archeologist who said the footstones were gathered an tossed in a pile, first names on them divorced from parents and surnames on the main stone. That cemetery's front, now APPEARING almost empty, was actually once so crowded, they closed the old cemetery to new burials, opened more land behind it, which also filled up, but had newer stones, so more of the main stones lasted. The burials were across from the Second Church of Braintree, letting mourners walk a coffin to its grave. Was this done for Alex and for Susan? Or was Fairmount, located out in East Weymouth, too far from their church? After all the TB and infant deaths and moves out west, was anyone left to walk Susan's coffin to her grave?
Alex's nephews went west, lie buried in Minnesota. The "church-facing-cemetery" setup still exists in their little town of Utica, MN. Utica's declared denomination was Presbyterian, but its Puritan-descended were of a tolerant sort, as they intermarried with Norwegians and Germans.
As Massachusetts slowly ended its church-state ties, denominations were declared in most places, but not in Weymouth. In neighboring Braintree, the second church declared itself First Congregational of Braintree, but only after its earlier first church to the north had turned Unitarian. Unitarian meant, among other differences, believing in God as a unity, without Christ and Spirit personalities, so no Trinity to contemplate. The First and Second Churches of Weymouth did not want to be seen as Unitarian. They did not want to declare a specific denomination either. A denomination forced some to leave, seen especially at the Unitarian church. So...they put Christ in their names and became First and Second Church of Christ of Weymouth instead. In modern times, the first or north one has joined with the Congregational churches, is again called First Weymouth. The second or south one merged with what were called Union churches, representing, for example, a union of people too distant from all neighboring town-authorized churches, in their case, too far from the second churches of both Braintree and Weymouth to be well-served by either, pre-automobile. With the auto, the old Union and South or Second Weymouth churches could merge and became South Union Church. They've kept the South Union name and have merged with the Congregational The combined result is now United Church of Christ as a denomination. The North Weymouth cemetery was on the site of the first Weymouth church's first meeting house.
Alex and Susan's cemetery of Fairmount is hard to place with a specific church?
To check. Do ANY photos for this cemetery show ANY footstones? ANY infant burials, as all cemeteries normally have some infants buried?)
Alex would have seen the infants die. The three sons living to adulthood still lived with him and Susan in their last US Census together. That was the 1850, naming his occupation as a "master mariner", mere months before he himself died.
The two eldest, Horatio and Marcellus, by first wife Sarah Dudley, were mariners like their father. Susan's second Leonard, a namesake for the one lost as an infant, was luckier than the baby who died. He would not die until the Civil War: FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-64J9-2JX
The 1850 Census took people by surprise. It asked people a question not asked in earlier censuses, where they were born. The census-taker would be in a hurry, so people would make a guess. There are patterns to the guesses, with even mistakes giving information. Children especially guessed their parents were born at some place they'd heard discussed.
This tendency to guess, which was stronger for the 1850 than for any later ones, and stronger for newlyweds doing their first census, caused whichever son answered the door for the Blanchards in 1850 to mix up the parents' birthplaces. The answerer said Susan was born in Maine, but Alex in Massachusetts. We know from Susan's written records, which match her parents' burial in Pembroke, that the answer for her was Massachusetts. By the next Census, relatives would have asked someone who knew and had better answers.
At 17, for the 1860 US Census in Weymouth, Leonard was still with his mother, Susan, now a widow,. Susan would correct the error of the last census by giving her birthplace as Massachusetts, not Maine
How had she made ends meet?
The census-takers then often pretended women had no occupation. The 1860 thus listed none for her, as if she and a young son, only been eight when his father died, had lived on air and fairy tale wishes since Alexander's death. From the circumstances, with seven strangers living in their house, ages 16-30, we assume what the census-taker refused to say. She supported herself. She did so as she took in boarders. She would be able to make more money by serving them meals and doing their laundry, than merely by renting them rooms. The census-taker's writing is flowery, hard to read, but Leonard, now 17, may have helped out, once older, by working as a mason:
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9BS3-WCP?mode=g&i=23
Interestingly, spouse Alexander's male heirs named Blanchard did not come from his sons, but his daughter. She was not an unwed mother, but instead married her cousin, a son of his brother Noah. All three of the young Blanchard sons seen with Alexander in the 1850 Census would die "too soon". Two would die in the years of the Civil War, allowing them to be in the 1860 Census. One did not make it into that Census, so he must have died before 1860.
For Marcellus, staying in marine work proved dangerous. Weather alone could lead a ship to ruin, in a day with little equipment to "see in the dark". Sarah Dudley's Marcellus thus would die "at sea". His death date not stated in any easily found source, but no 1860 census is found for him.
Family trees give an imprecise date for Susan's longest-living child, Leonard Wesley Blanchard. They merely say 1864, a Civil War year, with no month or place specified. There is no Massachusetts death record for him. However, a national record indicates he died in Oct. of 1864, in a NY military hospital temporarily erected on an island.
Alexander's son Leonard Wesley seems to be the "Wesley Blanchard", age about 18, who died on Oct. 14 of 1864, at David's Island in New York, presumedly injured earlier. That location is off the coast, outside NYC and New Rochelle, NY, in the Long Island area. The government rented the island for a military hospital, beginning in 1862, then owned it for some time after. Wiki's history writers said DeCamp General Hospital was "erected to house thousands of wounded prisoners from the battlefields of the American Civil War." Other sources say many deceased would be buried in a national cemetery on Long Island hurriedly put together around 1862, with other cemeteries added later (not clear if all early graves were marked).
Was there another Wesley Blanchard about the same age to confuse the issue? We've found only one similar in age. His death is accounted for elsewhere and was much later. He was the half-nephew named Wesley Blanchard born in Maine, not Massachusetts. That Wesley's mother was Leonard's significantly older half-sister, Elizabeth. She married very young, to another Blanchard, a cousin, at about age of 15. We can imagine her grieving and looking for love, as her marriage was in the year after her mother's death. Unlike too many who marry too young, she had a long and solid marriage with J.K., Joseph Knapp Blanchard. They would take in strays, the children of relatives whose parents had died and were themselves sick, as the poorly understood contagion of consumption (TB) took its huge toll on this family. She returned to Maine to live her life with J.K., where her son Wesley, who was Alexander's grandson, would be born after some others. Her son would be luckier than Alexander's own sons and the many consumption victims in the family. Her Wesley would live past age 60.
That leaves Alexander's son Horatio. Sarah's Horatio Nelson Blanchard died December 17, 1863, at age 29 years, 1 month and 11 days. Horatio would manage to live independently, seen in a state census in 1855 as "Nelson Blanchard", born Maine, boarding with a Tirrell family in Weymouth. He would marry, in mid-1860. That marriage timing was used by many young men expecting to go off to war. He married Ruth Maria Shaw, born in Weymouth, 19 to his 26, daughter of Oran P. or S. and Elizabeth Shaw.
Interestingly, Horatio gave his father's name as Capt. Marcellus Blanchard on the notice of intention, two days before the wedding, on June 1. On the actual wedding date, June 3, the clerk simply wrote Capt. Alex. He and Ruth would have a daughter, Lizzie Nelson Blanchard, but he never knew her. She was born March 14, 1864, some months after his death, but her father listed as if alive, a shoemaker born in Maine, mother Ruth Shaw, born in Weymouth.
Horatio's death record said he died of "consumption", their word for TB. That not only made him too sick to go to war, but also too weak to continue as a mariner. His occupation at death was one that could be done sitting down, a boot maker. His record gave his parents as Alexander and Sarah, and said he had been born in Freeman, Maine. Both his parents were deceased, so someone took a guess as to their birthplaces and said Weymouth:
DEATH: FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-68Y7-XN
Was Horatio named for Admiral Horatio Nelson of the British Royal Navy? Leonard's middle name of Wesley might have marked a switch from Puritan affiliations to Methodist. Horatio had the opportunity to marry before leaving for War, so he did.
Skip to ...Bottom (Grave List)
===================================
LOOSE ENDS--FAMILY. (To be pared down drastically after more links to family are made.)
IMMIGRANT ANCESTORS.
MOTHER'S. On her mother's side, varied sources say three Howlands had immigrated early, but separately, to the Plymouth colony. John, Arthur and Henry were guessed to be brothers, perhaps all sons of Henry Howland of Fen Stanton, England. If not wealthy, young men could not pay their own way, but worked for passage, with John said, at MinerDescent.com, to be an assistant to the minister on the Mayflower. Elizabeth Pearson White, an Illinois genealogist who died in 2011 at age 90, wrote a book about him, with web sites quoting this part:
"John Howland of the Mayflower was called by Governor William Bradford 'a lusty younge man'. He was one of the hired hands among the Mayflower company, being neither a 'Saint', as the Pilgrims were called, nor a 'Stranger', engaged for a specific duty, as was the soldier, Captain Myles Standish."
Modern researchers Tom Howland and Raymond T. Wing learned that Howland is a place name, meaning land on a ridge. As a place name, it shows multiple male DNAs.
Seven or eight unrelated sets ("haplogroups") have been counted for Howlands teted thus far (by 2016, in Howland and Ring's name study at FamilyTreeDNAcom). The Plymouth ones were almost all of haplogroup "R-M269", with one close match also labeled as "RZ". Some of their matches did not leave England. One matching family somehow ended in Spain; another migrated from MA to Kentucky. The other haplogroups are not Plymouth/Fen Stanton matches, so neither R-M269 nor RZ. They have too few test-takers so far to draw conclusions.
FATHER'S. The Bates immigrated to places northward of Plymouth County. They were early of Weymouth, so closer to Boston, yet south of it. Other Bates thought to be unrelated were early to Boston proper.
SPOUSE ALEXANDER. Alexander's town before their marriage became Susan's town after marriage. His parents had married and baptized children in the south parish (Second Church) of Weymouth much earlier, before his parents took his older siblings to Maine. Born in Maine, he was of record as a military musician from Pittston, Maine, at a young age, in 1814. (Their young were recruited as the War of 1812 deepened.)
He returned to Weymouth decades later. This happened relatively quickly after his first wife's death back in Maine. His occupation as a mariner made trips easier than if he had been kept in one place by farming or a mill.
Was he anxious to find a mother for his Maine-born children? His mother was also deceased, not able to help him out with childcare. He soon married his second wife, Sarah Hovey Thayer, in Weymouth, in Sept. of 1839. Prior relationships may have produced that marriage, as his mother had also been a Thayer, and that Sarah's mother had been another Blanchard. If anyone worried about the children to come, it was moot, as they had none. At that marriage, he was still listed as from "Freeman, Maine", where his parents last lived. (Newly annexed by Franklin County in 1835, their township had been in Somerset County when his mother died and, before that, Kennebec and, earlier still, Lincoln County. His parents' last location, it was a township with changing bosses and thus with some records mis-placed by changes in courthouses. Their tiny hamlet was North Freeman. It had a sawmill and, for a time, a narrow gauge railroad used as an excursion train for enjoying scenery and making fishing trips. Its short line went to nearby Kingfield and a few other places inside Maine. Towns would depopulate after he left, for varied reasons.)
Second wife Sarah died quickly. Alexander married again, this Susan B. Bates, merely a year after his second marriage. By then, he was a resident of Weymouth in his own right. Again, did prior relationships matter in making their match? A prior Susannah Bates had been an ancestor to Alexander five generations back.
IN MAINE. Alex's parents moved to Maine before 1800, according to G. Chamberlain's old "History of Weymouth". Varied Maine histories indicate they followed some others to Pittston who had left Weymouth earlier. Alex was born in Pittston, verified by Chamberlain.
His family farmed newly-opened land in interior Maine, won previously from the British and French and native tribes, after many decades of warring. (Many to live on the emerging US side of Canada either received land directly or from their parents, under paperwork called "bounty warrants", or they bought from people who had inherited such warrants. The warrants were regarded as making-up for the heirs' fathers serving in the acquiring wars as soldiers, generally soldiering without pay or paid in worthless "scrip", unable to pay mortgages back home, often causing foreclosures. Unlike others not so rewarded, the "lucky ones" to receive land bounties had served under politically well-connected military leaders. The well-connected could arrange for the bounties for their soldiers and, at times, for entirely new daughter towns for their old Massachusetts communities. major portions of Maine had once been inside old Massachusetts. These things combined to cause many Maine towns to be named for Massachusetts towns.)
In Maine, the others arriving first to their part also farmed. Some ran mills, saw and grist, as side businesses. River traffic allowed boating/ferrying/barging as occupations. The Penobscot River was later to have steamboats making their way to Boston, via Bangor on the coast, before the eras of railroads and then semi-trucks on freeways handled more traffic. The big river's connection to the sea helps us understand Alexander as "mariner", the occupation listed on his death record.
IN MASSACHUSETTS. Alex's father was described by G. Chamberlain as Nicholas Blanchard the junior while living in Weymouth. (Nicholas was husband to Mary Thayer, son to Nicholas the senior and another, different Sarah Hovey.)
Junior's household was not present in Weymouth for its 1800 US Census, so they had moved before then. The census in 1790 listed his household in Weymouth, side-by-side with one headed by a Nicholas Blanchard the senior. Other Blanchards were on the same page, listed in "visitation" order, so perhaps living along the same road. (Surveys were a new idea, needing instruction. The forms were totally handwritten in 1790, not pre-published with blanks for the surveyor to fill in. Too many still could not read and write. The census-takers thus visited houses and took answers orally, moving down a road, house-to-house.)
Those households with young members seemed of the right age to be the junior's brothers. They also could have included cousins or young uncles.
Alex's parents left their last vital record in a Weymouth church in 1797. That was at Second Church, for the infant baptism of Alex's next older brother, Noah Blanchard. Like most of their siblings, Noah stayed in interior Maine. Their scenic lumber-milling area was made into new counties as their tiny hamlets grew in number, with the boundaries revised later, artificially splitting families apart. All siblings were at one point in old Somerset County. Then, some townships of Somerset were annexed by other counties. Most of their siblings thus died in Franklin County, in Kingfield if not in Freeman. Noah had not moved far, merely to Farmington and then to Lewiston, Maine, according to Chamberlain. However, his portion of old former Somerset County would be put into Androscoggin County. The county changes were in 1835, so after the death of Alexander's mother in 1829, but before the death of his first wife.
His old support system was thus "chopped up" both by politicians and by death. We assume relatives back in Weymouth became matchmakers, so his later marriages were in Weymouth.
The authorized attendance area for Second Church was the South Parish of Weymouth, made legal by an act of the colony's legislature in the early 1720s, needed earlier, authorized only to relieve population pressure at the First Church. Nicholas the senior's grandfather, one of the early John Blanchards, had moved from north to south inside old Weymouth, as part of the making of a daughter settlement. That was about 10 years before the Second Church was authorized. Too distant to easily attend the First Church, they would be "churchless" in the meantime. Some family records in the churchless years are thus found at neighboring Braintree, with a church closer-by. The Second would not receive any of Weymouth's town taxes until the 1760s. Despite having to cut corners, it managed to keep better books on its baptisms, with only four years said to be missing, said Chamberlain. (A former principal at Hunt School, he would have been well aware of which families' records were too scant. Due to Chamberlain covering more of them, more is known about the early Blanchards than about the Bates. The Bates were split between Weymouth and Pembroke. Chamberlain ignored Pembroke. )
Ahead of Chamberlain writing his history, both Pembroke and Weymouth made books for local "Vital Records through 1850". The 1850 cut-off date almost excluded Alexander's stone, and did exclude Susan's.
Town clerks and committees compiled the results, gathering up and organizing town and church records. There were "holes" to be filled. Careless pastors had taken records with them when they moved. For a temporary time, the intolerants among the adult baptizers had driven the infant baptizers out of First Church at Weymouth. There was the permanent problem of missing birth material for children of adult baptizers (with the tolerant ones allowed to stay after the infant-baptizing majority took their church back and the town kicked out the intolerant minority).
To fill the holes in births, they checked graveyards, finding stones then, that are missing now, 100 years later, and inferred birth year from age at death, if needed. This caused Alexander's stone to be listed under the Birth Records in Weymouth's book. That caused the mistaken idea that he had been born in Weymouth, not Maine.
They accepted family records. The Weymouth Bates were among ones to submit records to Weymouth. The Pembroke Bates were less well-covered, so Susan's grandparent Bates are uncertain.
(The Eddy Town Records Fund financed the two books' publishing by the New England Genealogical Society, with Pembroke's printed in 1911. The Weymouth area's historian, George Chamberlain, saw his book published in 1923, by the Weymouth Historical Society. )
===
THAYER IN-LAWS. Alex's mother, Mary Thayer, being female and leaving the area, was a poorly known individual inside a locally well-known family. Perhaps baptized as Maribah, perhaps a daughter of a Noah Thayer, neither of those things about her are certain, as dates or namings are "off a bit". Her Thayers, like his Blanchards, were also from Norfolk County.
With some in her ancestors' large families connected to ship-building, Mary's prior generations located a bit upstream of Weymouth. Theirs was the old town of Braintree, on the north side of the wide Weymouth River, beginning where Weymouth Landing ended. (Weymouth proper was on the south side of the salty/saline part of the big "fore" river. Weymouth's big harbor accessed the sea. Plymouth county wound around Weymouth and Norfolk's lower edge, trying to gain maximum access to the Atlantic Ocean.)
The places of the Bates and Blanchards and Thayers all started as rural "towns", more like townships with hamlets inside, one subsidized church per town/township. After the era of trappers and traders and workers mining bog iron, which included some "husbanding" animal herds in marsh pastures, their country places filled with regular small farmers and their mills and orchards. Inns and taverns sprung up around mills and churches, so farmers could wait for milling to finish and families could attend a faraway church for an infant's baptism or a relative's marriage or funeral. These were well-remembered events, considered "vital" to the ongoing life of the community, so written down.
Being a mariner or shipbuilder, or working as such in the off-season after summer farming, was also a choice. Blue collar work, such as quarrying in the Blue Hills and blacksmithing, let more permanently stop farming early. They slowly became more urban, with shoemaking a common "cottage industry" before the advent of factories. Their old factories mostly gone, these places are now all varied suburbs, south to southeast of Boston.
"Susan B. Bates Blanchard"
Weymouth, 1885, January.
Died the 11th, of record the 13th.
Widowed, age 74 years, 3 months, 7 days.
Cause Pneumonia
Her survivors, giving information for the record, believed that she and both of her parents, Edward Bates and Margaret Howland, had been born at Pembroke. Her parents lie buried there, their stones still clearly readable.
HER DEATH SOURCE: "Massachusetts Deaths, 1841-1915", handwritten list, line 9. Image last archived Dec., 2014, FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-DHF3-XHZ
BIRTH NOTE: Oct. 4 is a likely birth date, calculated by subtracting her age at death from date of death. Using just the month signals it is a calculation.)
===================================
Third wife of mariner Capt. Alexander Blanchard, she would become a second mother for the younger ones among his prior children. She would bear her own children as well, with only one living to adulthood, but then dying in a Civil War year, leaving her a widow with no survivors.
MARRIAGE. Both their churches/towns recorded their intent to marry ("banns"), with the marriage following, so their marriage year as 1840 is found multiple times. Reading "banns"/intent at both places, bride's church and groom's church, in theory, gave an opportunity for prior spouses, etc., to raise objections. Prior spouses presumed dead usually were, in fact, dead, so usually no one objected. The wedding was often at the church of the bride, true for her. She called him "Alex" when filing for marriage at her own church, in Pembroke, in Plymouth County.
HER NAME. "Susan" began as a nickname for Susannah.
The Bates and Blanchard trees began intertwining when the first Susannah Bates in Weymouth married Alexander Blanchard's immigrant ancestor, Nathaniel Blanchard. His immigrant father, Thomas Blanchard, "brought over" Nathaniel at about age 7, with several brothers.
A Susannah Bicknell Bates lies buried in the same cemetery as spouse Alexander. Born in 1794, given the nickname Susan, she was of the right age to be a younger cousin or even a sister to this Susan's father. (Susan's father, Edward, was born around 1781.) Was this Susan B. a namesake for Susannah Bicknell?
HUSBAND'S GRAVESTONE. Her husband, Alexander Blanchard, died decades before Susan. As a mariner, he was better able than many to move around, to go and fro, between Maine and Massachusetts. His children across three wives can be counted like this:
Wife1, long-enough marriage to have five children, born Maine, married Maine, according to a Dudley family history, Alex's stone acts as a cenotaph, repeating the information seen in two other sources that Wife1 died in Maine.
Wife2, too-short marriage, zero children, born Weymouth, married Weymouth, reportedly died in Maine in the year after marriage. The source for the death location is not the stone stating her name, but a record book. It gave Freeman, Maine, for both her death place and for his residence at the time they married, presumedly so his first five children would not have to leave their home. We assume she is buried here in Massachusetts, but her mention on his stone could be just a cenotaph.
Wife3, this Susan, longtime marriage with four children, died Weymouth.
Made of a firmer rock than limestone, the words on Alexander's stone are clearer than seen on many gravestones of its age. His stone lists his two prior wives, Sarah Dudley, whose true stone has been found at her burial place in Maine, and Sarah Hovey Thayer, for whom a mention at his is the only stone found as of 2016.
More importantly, someone left room on the stone for his third wife, this Susan. She survived him, so would have been the one ordering his stone, asking that space be left for her "when her time came". Yet, the space for her has been left blank.
If no survivors were still local after she died in her 70s, the town would have buried her there, but would not have paid for her marker. For the moment, her burial is treated as unplaced. If we find that there were no related survivors (siblings) on her Bates side as well, we'll assume she was buried here, but that funds were exhausted, so no carving was made.
THEIR KNOWN CHILDREN; HISTORY BONUSES & FLAWS. George Walter Chamberlain, a former Weymouth school principal, wrote a history of Weymouth in the 1920s. He included the Blanchards of Weymouth and Maine. He wrote 70-90 years after the death of Alex and Wife1, so relied on a Vital Records book for old Weymouth.
Chamberlain was thorough and understood local church history, so could track families by church and not just by town, needed to make sense of early "birth records" that were collected at infant baptisms. Two town-authorized churches were built earliest, "First" for north and significantly later, "Second" for south. Then came two "union" churches, along the edges of Weymouth, as fringe areas avoided earlier began to fill-in.
Chamberlain understood that the old King's church had more members in Weymouth than normal for a strongly Puritan town. (Were their early church/chapel records of baptism and marriages burned in the American Revolution?)
In general, Methodists were initially a praying club or praying society inside the King's Church. Those in Britain were eventually kicked out of the King's Church after they took over pulpits and preached that anyone not adhering to emerging Methodist views was wrong. (Did that happen here, too? Not as much? If the Methodist clubs/societies here were more tolerant?)
Post-American Revolution, the societies not loyal to the King, yet not willing to turn Calvinist, seeing the latter as too negative in its views of human nature and free will, made their own churches. As long as First and Second Church did not declare denominations, was it possible for the early Methodists to form a society inside? Served by traveling ministers? Or...? Many in Weymouth and neighboring Pembroke would join a Methodist-Episcopalian (ME) denomination eventually, with the Methodist side more country, accordingly poorer and plainer to match farmers' pocketbooks, while the Episcopalian end was more city, better off, so could be more ornate and have more variety in services. Three Rev. Bates in the Weymouth-Pembroke area were circuit-riding minsters ("itinerant" or traveling) for the Methodist-Episcopal church. They may have been cousins to Sarah, but too many early records for her own parents have been lost to know this for certain.
Chamberlain was thorough. He listed both Alexander's known five children with first wife Sarah Dudley, plus Alexander's known four children with this third wife, Susan B. Bates, nine children total, and he named parents-in-law ("History of Weymouth", vol. 3. on and near p.110).
Chamberlain's history has a peculiarity. He relied on an older Vital Records book for Weymouth that had both a bonus and a flaw.
The bonus? More gravestones were still clear and unbroken then than now, more birth years or ages were still readable. Once stones lost readability, books like his could be consulted.
The flaw? A lack of clarity on birth source. Whenever infant baptism/birth records were missing from church and town, the town clerks substituted a gravestone's birth year. ()It was either stone-carved or, more often, calculated from age at death. Each such entry ended with an abbreviation for the stone's local graveyard. The graveyard was only way you could tell it was stone information, apart from the fact that parents' names were missing. Because the abbreviations were minimal, lots of readers did not know that they signaled a gravestone only, no birth record.
This created a false impression. People born elsewhere but who died in Weymouth were treated as born in Weymouth.
BEWARE: Weymouth's "false births" were passed up to the county/state level, in addition to "true births". How to detect? First, too many birthplaces will be given as Weymouth, especially for families that moved around.
One sign? No parent is listed. (The Weymouth infant baptizing churches ALWAYS named at least one parent, sometimes a grandparent if a child's mother died and the father was away sailing or in the military. The baptism was a commitment made in public to raise the child well, parent or a guardian's names were deemed essential.)
In practice, what does this mean? Whenever finding a birth source that says Weymouth, but that gives no names for parents, a non-Weymouth source must be found.
These could be a family history by in-laws from out-of-town or out-of-state. For these Blanchards, with Wife1's parents born in NH and herself in Maine, the source was by in-law Dean Dudley. Done while Alexander and his eldest children lived, it stated Alexander and the first children were also born in Maine, not Weymouth as many claim. It gave different towns inside Maine. It was a sign of accuracy, to not "simply assume" the same town for everyone.
Alex's last four children were by Susan. They were all infant-baptized, with at least one parent named. There is no doubt they were Weymouth births.
The childrens' names were repeated online at genealogy.com by Ward-E-Hobby, in his Blanchard tree, generally very well-done. Its main error is the same, found in other people's trees: Listing too many who died in Weymouth as also born in Weymouth.
Alexander had first married Sarah Dudley in Phillips, Franklin County, Maine, on June 30, 1822. Their five known children were born 1823-1834, all in Maine, according to Dean Dudley's book.
Alexander's last wife, Susan Bates, was not a Dudley. She and her children were not in Dudley's book. Those second children were a second family, born 1841-1846, those truly all in Weymouth. There was a seven-year gap between the two sets of children. However, some of the older set would stay with Susan and Alex, well into adulthood.
Susan named two of her children Leonard after a Blanchard uncle. Only Leonard Wesley Blanchard, her fourth child, lived to adulthood. The name Wesley is a sign of Methodism, as an early leader was John Wesley, who led a saintly life.
These three of Susan's four died as infants:
Their first Leonard Blanchard (1841-1841);
Wilbur Fiske Blanchard (1845-1846);
Sarah Wilbur Blanchard(1846-1847).
The "Vital Records of Weymouth Through 1850" book, not printed until 1910, gave measles for one, croup for another, and a third unspecified, as to cause of death. There were no vaccinations yet. If a child was already weakened by an earlier flu, a case of "croup" (diphtheria?) or measles could kill.
There may have been inexpensive "footstones" with names for the infants, instead of larger headstones. A problem? Footstones in some other local cemeteries, such as the Elm Street Cemetery in the neighboring town of Braintree, were known to have been gathered up and tossed to make machine-mowing easier.
Fiske and Wilbur were surnames re-used as middle names. They might name a mother and grandmother on Susan's side, just as Susan's middle "B" possibly stood for Bicknell, another maternal surname. We, as of 2016, have no other clues to her parents' ancestry.
===================================================
Her only child to survive through much, not all of the Civil War?
"BIRTHS"
"Blanchard (see Blanchar, Blancher, Blancherd, Blanchers, Blanchord)"
"Leonard Wesley, s. Alexander, mariner, and Susan, June 13, 1843"
Source: 1910 book, "Vital Records of Weymouth Through 1850", page 50.
===================================================
(In Progress...THIS REFERENCE SECTION WILL BE DELETED AFTER WE FIND STONES. The Elm Street Cemetery was examined by an archeologist who said the footstones were gathered an tossed in a pile, first names on them divorced from parents and surnames on the main stone. That cemetery's front, now APPEARING almost empty, was actually once so crowded, they closed the old cemetery to new burials, opened more land behind it, which also filled up, but had newer stones, so more of the main stones lasted. The burials were across from the Second Church of Braintree, letting mourners walk a coffin to its grave. Was this done for Alex and for Susan? Or was Fairmount, located out in East Weymouth, too far from their church? After all the TB and infant deaths and moves out west, was anyone left to walk Susan's coffin to her grave?
Alex's nephews went west, lie buried in Minnesota. The "church-facing-cemetery" setup still exists in their little town of Utica, MN. Utica's declared denomination was Presbyterian, but its Puritan-descended were of a tolerant sort, as they intermarried with Norwegians and Germans.
As Massachusetts slowly ended its church-state ties, denominations were declared in most places, but not in Weymouth. In neighboring Braintree, the second church declared itself First Congregational of Braintree, but only after its earlier first church to the north had turned Unitarian. Unitarian meant, among other differences, believing in God as a unity, without Christ and Spirit personalities, so no Trinity to contemplate. The First and Second Churches of Weymouth did not want to be seen as Unitarian. They did not want to declare a specific denomination either. A denomination forced some to leave, seen especially at the Unitarian church. So...they put Christ in their names and became First and Second Church of Christ of Weymouth instead. In modern times, the first or north one has joined with the Congregational churches, is again called First Weymouth. The second or south one merged with what were called Union churches, representing, for example, a union of people too distant from all neighboring town-authorized churches, in their case, too far from the second churches of both Braintree and Weymouth to be well-served by either, pre-automobile. With the auto, the old Union and South or Second Weymouth churches could merge and became South Union Church. They've kept the South Union name and have merged with the Congregational The combined result is now United Church of Christ as a denomination. The North Weymouth cemetery was on the site of the first Weymouth church's first meeting house.
Alex and Susan's cemetery of Fairmount is hard to place with a specific church?
To check. Do ANY photos for this cemetery show ANY footstones? ANY infant burials, as all cemeteries normally have some infants buried?)
Alex would have seen the infants die. The three sons living to adulthood still lived with him and Susan in their last US Census together. That was the 1850, naming his occupation as a "master mariner", mere months before he himself died.
The two eldest, Horatio and Marcellus, by first wife Sarah Dudley, were mariners like their father. Susan's second Leonard, a namesake for the one lost as an infant, was luckier than the baby who died. He would not die until the Civil War: FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-64J9-2JX
The 1850 Census took people by surprise. It asked people a question not asked in earlier censuses, where they were born. The census-taker would be in a hurry, so people would make a guess. There are patterns to the guesses, with even mistakes giving information. Children especially guessed their parents were born at some place they'd heard discussed.
This tendency to guess, which was stronger for the 1850 than for any later ones, and stronger for newlyweds doing their first census, caused whichever son answered the door for the Blanchards in 1850 to mix up the parents' birthplaces. The answerer said Susan was born in Maine, but Alex in Massachusetts. We know from Susan's written records, which match her parents' burial in Pembroke, that the answer for her was Massachusetts. By the next Census, relatives would have asked someone who knew and had better answers.
At 17, for the 1860 US Census in Weymouth, Leonard was still with his mother, Susan, now a widow,. Susan would correct the error of the last census by giving her birthplace as Massachusetts, not Maine
How had she made ends meet?
The census-takers then often pretended women had no occupation. The 1860 thus listed none for her, as if she and a young son, only been eight when his father died, had lived on air and fairy tale wishes since Alexander's death. From the circumstances, with seven strangers living in their house, ages 16-30, we assume what the census-taker refused to say. She supported herself. She did so as she took in boarders. She would be able to make more money by serving them meals and doing their laundry, than merely by renting them rooms. The census-taker's writing is flowery, hard to read, but Leonard, now 17, may have helped out, once older, by working as a mason:
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9BS3-WCP?mode=g&i=23
Interestingly, spouse Alexander's male heirs named Blanchard did not come from his sons, but his daughter. She was not an unwed mother, but instead married her cousin, a son of his brother Noah. All three of the young Blanchard sons seen with Alexander in the 1850 Census would die "too soon". Two would die in the years of the Civil War, allowing them to be in the 1860 Census. One did not make it into that Census, so he must have died before 1860.
For Marcellus, staying in marine work proved dangerous. Weather alone could lead a ship to ruin, in a day with little equipment to "see in the dark". Sarah Dudley's Marcellus thus would die "at sea". His death date not stated in any easily found source, but no 1860 census is found for him.
Family trees give an imprecise date for Susan's longest-living child, Leonard Wesley Blanchard. They merely say 1864, a Civil War year, with no month or place specified. There is no Massachusetts death record for him. However, a national record indicates he died in Oct. of 1864, in a NY military hospital temporarily erected on an island.
Alexander's son Leonard Wesley seems to be the "Wesley Blanchard", age about 18, who died on Oct. 14 of 1864, at David's Island in New York, presumedly injured earlier. That location is off the coast, outside NYC and New Rochelle, NY, in the Long Island area. The government rented the island for a military hospital, beginning in 1862, then owned it for some time after. Wiki's history writers said DeCamp General Hospital was "erected to house thousands of wounded prisoners from the battlefields of the American Civil War." Other sources say many deceased would be buried in a national cemetery on Long Island hurriedly put together around 1862, with other cemeteries added later (not clear if all early graves were marked).
Was there another Wesley Blanchard about the same age to confuse the issue? We've found only one similar in age. His death is accounted for elsewhere and was much later. He was the half-nephew named Wesley Blanchard born in Maine, not Massachusetts. That Wesley's mother was Leonard's significantly older half-sister, Elizabeth. She married very young, to another Blanchard, a cousin, at about age of 15. We can imagine her grieving and looking for love, as her marriage was in the year after her mother's death. Unlike too many who marry too young, she had a long and solid marriage with J.K., Joseph Knapp Blanchard. They would take in strays, the children of relatives whose parents had died and were themselves sick, as the poorly understood contagion of consumption (TB) took its huge toll on this family. She returned to Maine to live her life with J.K., where her son Wesley, who was Alexander's grandson, would be born after some others. Her son would be luckier than Alexander's own sons and the many consumption victims in the family. Her Wesley would live past age 60.
That leaves Alexander's son Horatio. Sarah's Horatio Nelson Blanchard died December 17, 1863, at age 29 years, 1 month and 11 days. Horatio would manage to live independently, seen in a state census in 1855 as "Nelson Blanchard", born Maine, boarding with a Tirrell family in Weymouth. He would marry, in mid-1860. That marriage timing was used by many young men expecting to go off to war. He married Ruth Maria Shaw, born in Weymouth, 19 to his 26, daughter of Oran P. or S. and Elizabeth Shaw.
Interestingly, Horatio gave his father's name as Capt. Marcellus Blanchard on the notice of intention, two days before the wedding, on June 1. On the actual wedding date, June 3, the clerk simply wrote Capt. Alex. He and Ruth would have a daughter, Lizzie Nelson Blanchard, but he never knew her. She was born March 14, 1864, some months after his death, but her father listed as if alive, a shoemaker born in Maine, mother Ruth Shaw, born in Weymouth.
Horatio's death record said he died of "consumption", their word for TB. That not only made him too sick to go to war, but also too weak to continue as a mariner. His occupation at death was one that could be done sitting down, a boot maker. His record gave his parents as Alexander and Sarah, and said he had been born in Freeman, Maine. Both his parents were deceased, so someone took a guess as to their birthplaces and said Weymouth:
DEATH: FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-68Y7-XN
Was Horatio named for Admiral Horatio Nelson of the British Royal Navy? Leonard's middle name of Wesley might have marked a switch from Puritan affiliations to Methodist. Horatio had the opportunity to marry before leaving for War, so he did.
Skip to ...Bottom (Grave List)
===================================
LOOSE ENDS--FAMILY. (To be pared down drastically after more links to family are made.)
IMMIGRANT ANCESTORS.
MOTHER'S. On her mother's side, varied sources say three Howlands had immigrated early, but separately, to the Plymouth colony. John, Arthur and Henry were guessed to be brothers, perhaps all sons of Henry Howland of Fen Stanton, England. If not wealthy, young men could not pay their own way, but worked for passage, with John said, at MinerDescent.com, to be an assistant to the minister on the Mayflower. Elizabeth Pearson White, an Illinois genealogist who died in 2011 at age 90, wrote a book about him, with web sites quoting this part:
"John Howland of the Mayflower was called by Governor William Bradford 'a lusty younge man'. He was one of the hired hands among the Mayflower company, being neither a 'Saint', as the Pilgrims were called, nor a 'Stranger', engaged for a specific duty, as was the soldier, Captain Myles Standish."
Modern researchers Tom Howland and Raymond T. Wing learned that Howland is a place name, meaning land on a ridge. As a place name, it shows multiple male DNAs.
Seven or eight unrelated sets ("haplogroups") have been counted for Howlands teted thus far (by 2016, in Howland and Ring's name study at FamilyTreeDNAcom). The Plymouth ones were almost all of haplogroup "R-M269", with one close match also labeled as "RZ". Some of their matches did not leave England. One matching family somehow ended in Spain; another migrated from MA to Kentucky. The other haplogroups are not Plymouth/Fen Stanton matches, so neither R-M269 nor RZ. They have too few test-takers so far to draw conclusions.
FATHER'S. The Bates immigrated to places northward of Plymouth County. They were early of Weymouth, so closer to Boston, yet south of it. Other Bates thought to be unrelated were early to Boston proper.
SPOUSE ALEXANDER. Alexander's town before their marriage became Susan's town after marriage. His parents had married and baptized children in the south parish (Second Church) of Weymouth much earlier, before his parents took his older siblings to Maine. Born in Maine, he was of record as a military musician from Pittston, Maine, at a young age, in 1814. (Their young were recruited as the War of 1812 deepened.)
He returned to Weymouth decades later. This happened relatively quickly after his first wife's death back in Maine. His occupation as a mariner made trips easier than if he had been kept in one place by farming or a mill.
Was he anxious to find a mother for his Maine-born children? His mother was also deceased, not able to help him out with childcare. He soon married his second wife, Sarah Hovey Thayer, in Weymouth, in Sept. of 1839. Prior relationships may have produced that marriage, as his mother had also been a Thayer, and that Sarah's mother had been another Blanchard. If anyone worried about the children to come, it was moot, as they had none. At that marriage, he was still listed as from "Freeman, Maine", where his parents last lived. (Newly annexed by Franklin County in 1835, their township had been in Somerset County when his mother died and, before that, Kennebec and, earlier still, Lincoln County. His parents' last location, it was a township with changing bosses and thus with some records mis-placed by changes in courthouses. Their tiny hamlet was North Freeman. It had a sawmill and, for a time, a narrow gauge railroad used as an excursion train for enjoying scenery and making fishing trips. Its short line went to nearby Kingfield and a few other places inside Maine. Towns would depopulate after he left, for varied reasons.)
Second wife Sarah died quickly. Alexander married again, this Susan B. Bates, merely a year after his second marriage. By then, he was a resident of Weymouth in his own right. Again, did prior relationships matter in making their match? A prior Susannah Bates had been an ancestor to Alexander five generations back.
IN MAINE. Alex's parents moved to Maine before 1800, according to G. Chamberlain's old "History of Weymouth". Varied Maine histories indicate they followed some others to Pittston who had left Weymouth earlier. Alex was born in Pittston, verified by Chamberlain.
His family farmed newly-opened land in interior Maine, won previously from the British and French and native tribes, after many decades of warring. (Many to live on the emerging US side of Canada either received land directly or from their parents, under paperwork called "bounty warrants", or they bought from people who had inherited such warrants. The warrants were regarded as making-up for the heirs' fathers serving in the acquiring wars as soldiers, generally soldiering without pay or paid in worthless "scrip", unable to pay mortgages back home, often causing foreclosures. Unlike others not so rewarded, the "lucky ones" to receive land bounties had served under politically well-connected military leaders. The well-connected could arrange for the bounties for their soldiers and, at times, for entirely new daughter towns for their old Massachusetts communities. major portions of Maine had once been inside old Massachusetts. These things combined to cause many Maine towns to be named for Massachusetts towns.)
In Maine, the others arriving first to their part also farmed. Some ran mills, saw and grist, as side businesses. River traffic allowed boating/ferrying/barging as occupations. The Penobscot River was later to have steamboats making their way to Boston, via Bangor on the coast, before the eras of railroads and then semi-trucks on freeways handled more traffic. The big river's connection to the sea helps us understand Alexander as "mariner", the occupation listed on his death record.
IN MASSACHUSETTS. Alex's father was described by G. Chamberlain as Nicholas Blanchard the junior while living in Weymouth. (Nicholas was husband to Mary Thayer, son to Nicholas the senior and another, different Sarah Hovey.)
Junior's household was not present in Weymouth for its 1800 US Census, so they had moved before then. The census in 1790 listed his household in Weymouth, side-by-side with one headed by a Nicholas Blanchard the senior. Other Blanchards were on the same page, listed in "visitation" order, so perhaps living along the same road. (Surveys were a new idea, needing instruction. The forms were totally handwritten in 1790, not pre-published with blanks for the surveyor to fill in. Too many still could not read and write. The census-takers thus visited houses and took answers orally, moving down a road, house-to-house.)
Those households with young members seemed of the right age to be the junior's brothers. They also could have included cousins or young uncles.
Alex's parents left their last vital record in a Weymouth church in 1797. That was at Second Church, for the infant baptism of Alex's next older brother, Noah Blanchard. Like most of their siblings, Noah stayed in interior Maine. Their scenic lumber-milling area was made into new counties as their tiny hamlets grew in number, with the boundaries revised later, artificially splitting families apart. All siblings were at one point in old Somerset County. Then, some townships of Somerset were annexed by other counties. Most of their siblings thus died in Franklin County, in Kingfield if not in Freeman. Noah had not moved far, merely to Farmington and then to Lewiston, Maine, according to Chamberlain. However, his portion of old former Somerset County would be put into Androscoggin County. The county changes were in 1835, so after the death of Alexander's mother in 1829, but before the death of his first wife.
His old support system was thus "chopped up" both by politicians and by death. We assume relatives back in Weymouth became matchmakers, so his later marriages were in Weymouth.
The authorized attendance area for Second Church was the South Parish of Weymouth, made legal by an act of the colony's legislature in the early 1720s, needed earlier, authorized only to relieve population pressure at the First Church. Nicholas the senior's grandfather, one of the early John Blanchards, had moved from north to south inside old Weymouth, as part of the making of a daughter settlement. That was about 10 years before the Second Church was authorized. Too distant to easily attend the First Church, they would be "churchless" in the meantime. Some family records in the churchless years are thus found at neighboring Braintree, with a church closer-by. The Second would not receive any of Weymouth's town taxes until the 1760s. Despite having to cut corners, it managed to keep better books on its baptisms, with only four years said to be missing, said Chamberlain. (A former principal at Hunt School, he would have been well aware of which families' records were too scant. Due to Chamberlain covering more of them, more is known about the early Blanchards than about the Bates. The Bates were split between Weymouth and Pembroke. Chamberlain ignored Pembroke. )
Ahead of Chamberlain writing his history, both Pembroke and Weymouth made books for local "Vital Records through 1850". The 1850 cut-off date almost excluded Alexander's stone, and did exclude Susan's.
Town clerks and committees compiled the results, gathering up and organizing town and church records. There were "holes" to be filled. Careless pastors had taken records with them when they moved. For a temporary time, the intolerants among the adult baptizers had driven the infant baptizers out of First Church at Weymouth. There was the permanent problem of missing birth material for children of adult baptizers (with the tolerant ones allowed to stay after the infant-baptizing majority took their church back and the town kicked out the intolerant minority).
To fill the holes in births, they checked graveyards, finding stones then, that are missing now, 100 years later, and inferred birth year from age at death, if needed. This caused Alexander's stone to be listed under the Birth Records in Weymouth's book. That caused the mistaken idea that he had been born in Weymouth, not Maine.
They accepted family records. The Weymouth Bates were among ones to submit records to Weymouth. The Pembroke Bates were less well-covered, so Susan's grandparent Bates are uncertain.
(The Eddy Town Records Fund financed the two books' publishing by the New England Genealogical Society, with Pembroke's printed in 1911. The Weymouth area's historian, George Chamberlain, saw his book published in 1923, by the Weymouth Historical Society. )
===
THAYER IN-LAWS. Alex's mother, Mary Thayer, being female and leaving the area, was a poorly known individual inside a locally well-known family. Perhaps baptized as Maribah, perhaps a daughter of a Noah Thayer, neither of those things about her are certain, as dates or namings are "off a bit". Her Thayers, like his Blanchards, were also from Norfolk County.
With some in her ancestors' large families connected to ship-building, Mary's prior generations located a bit upstream of Weymouth. Theirs was the old town of Braintree, on the north side of the wide Weymouth River, beginning where Weymouth Landing ended. (Weymouth proper was on the south side of the salty/saline part of the big "fore" river. Weymouth's big harbor accessed the sea. Plymouth county wound around Weymouth and Norfolk's lower edge, trying to gain maximum access to the Atlantic Ocean.)
The places of the Bates and Blanchards and Thayers all started as rural "towns", more like townships with hamlets inside, one subsidized church per town/township. After the era of trappers and traders and workers mining bog iron, which included some "husbanding" animal herds in marsh pastures, their country places filled with regular small farmers and their mills and orchards. Inns and taverns sprung up around mills and churches, so farmers could wait for milling to finish and families could attend a faraway church for an infant's baptism or a relative's marriage or funeral. These were well-remembered events, considered "vital" to the ongoing life of the community, so written down.
Being a mariner or shipbuilder, or working as such in the off-season after summer farming, was also a choice. Blue collar work, such as quarrying in the Blue Hills and blacksmithing, let more permanently stop farming early. They slowly became more urban, with shoemaking a common "cottage industry" before the advent of factories. Their old factories mostly gone, these places are now all varied suburbs, south to southeast of Boston.
Scroll to ...Bottom List
"Susan B. Bates Blanchard"
Weymouth, 1885, January.
Died the 11th, of record the 13th.
Widowed, age 74 years, 3 months, 7 days.
Cause Pneumonia
Her survivors, giving information for the record, believed that she and both of her parents, Edward Bates and Margaret Howland, had been born at Pembroke. Her parents lie buried there, their stones still clearly readable.
HER DEATH SOURCE: "Massachusetts Deaths, 1841-1915", handwritten list, line 9. Image last archived Dec., 2014, FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-DHF3-XHZ
BIRTH NOTE: Oct. 4 is a likely birth date, calculated by subtracting her age at death from date of death. Using just the month signals it is a calculation.)
===================================
Third wife of mariner Capt. Alexander Blanchard, she would become a second mother for the younger ones among his prior children. She would bear her own children as well, with only one living to adulthood, but then dying in a Civil War year, leaving her a widow with no survivors.
MARRIAGE. Both their churches/towns recorded their intent to marry ("banns"), with the marriage following, so their marriage year as 1840 is found multiple times. Reading "banns"/intent at both places, bride's church and groom's church, in theory, gave an opportunity for prior spouses, etc., to raise objections. Prior spouses presumed dead usually were, in fact, dead, so usually no one objected. The wedding was often at the church of the bride, true for her. She called him "Alex" when filing for marriage at her own church, in Pembroke, in Plymouth County.
HER NAME. "Susan" began as a nickname for Susannah.
The Bates and Blanchard trees began intertwining when the first Susannah Bates in Weymouth married Alexander Blanchard's immigrant ancestor, Nathaniel Blanchard. His immigrant father, Thomas Blanchard, "brought over" Nathaniel at about age 7, with several brothers.
A Susannah Bicknell Bates lies buried in the same cemetery as spouse Alexander. Born in 1794, given the nickname Susan, she was of the right age to be a younger cousin or even a sister to this Susan's father. (Susan's father, Edward, was born around 1781.) Was this Susan B. a namesake for Susannah Bicknell?
HUSBAND'S GRAVESTONE. Her husband, Alexander Blanchard, died decades before Susan. As a mariner, he was better able than many to move around, to go and fro, between Maine and Massachusetts. His children across three wives can be counted like this:
Wife1, long-enough marriage to have five children, born Maine, married Maine, according to a Dudley family history, Alex's stone acts as a cenotaph, repeating the information seen in two other sources that Wife1 died in Maine.
Wife2, too-short marriage, zero children, born Weymouth, married Weymouth, reportedly died in Maine in the year after marriage. The source for the death location is not the stone stating her name, but a record book. It gave Freeman, Maine, for both her death place and for his residence at the time they married, presumedly so his first five children would not have to leave their home. We assume she is buried here in Massachusetts, but her mention on his stone could be just a cenotaph.
Wife3, this Susan, longtime marriage with four children, died Weymouth.
Made of a firmer rock than limestone, the words on Alexander's stone are clearer than seen on many gravestones of its age. His stone lists his two prior wives, Sarah Dudley, whose true stone has been found at her burial place in Maine, and Sarah Hovey Thayer, for whom a mention at his is the only stone found as of 2016.
More importantly, someone left room on the stone for his third wife, this Susan. She survived him, so would have been the one ordering his stone, asking that space be left for her "when her time came". Yet, the space for her has been left blank.
If no survivors were still local after she died in her 70s, the town would have buried her there, but would not have paid for her marker. For the moment, her burial is treated as unplaced. If we find that there were no related survivors (siblings) on her Bates side as well, we'll assume she was buried here, but that funds were exhausted, so no carving was made.
THEIR KNOWN CHILDREN; HISTORY BONUSES & FLAWS. George Walter Chamberlain, a former Weymouth school principal, wrote a history of Weymouth in the 1920s. He included the Blanchards of Weymouth and Maine. He wrote 70-90 years after the death of Alex and Wife1, so relied on a Vital Records book for old Weymouth.
Chamberlain was thorough and understood local church history, so could track families by church and not just by town, needed to make sense of early "birth records" that were collected at infant baptisms. Two town-authorized churches were built earliest, "First" for north and significantly later, "Second" for south. Then came two "union" churches, along the edges of Weymouth, as fringe areas avoided earlier began to fill-in.
Chamberlain understood that the old King's church had more members in Weymouth than normal for a strongly Puritan town. (Were their early church/chapel records of baptism and marriages burned in the American Revolution?)
In general, Methodists were initially a praying club or praying society inside the King's Church. Those in Britain were eventually kicked out of the King's Church after they took over pulpits and preached that anyone not adhering to emerging Methodist views was wrong. (Did that happen here, too? Not as much? If the Methodist clubs/societies here were more tolerant?)
Post-American Revolution, the societies not loyal to the King, yet not willing to turn Calvinist, seeing the latter as too negative in its views of human nature and free will, made their own churches. As long as First and Second Church did not declare denominations, was it possible for the early Methodists to form a society inside? Served by traveling ministers? Or...? Many in Weymouth and neighboring Pembroke would join a Methodist-Episcopalian (ME) denomination eventually, with the Methodist side more country, accordingly poorer and plainer to match farmers' pocketbooks, while the Episcopalian end was more city, better off, so could be more ornate and have more variety in services. Three Rev. Bates in the Weymouth-Pembroke area were circuit-riding minsters ("itinerant" or traveling) for the Methodist-Episcopal church. They may have been cousins to Sarah, but too many early records for her own parents have been lost to know this for certain.
Chamberlain was thorough. He listed both Alexander's known five children with first wife Sarah Dudley, plus Alexander's known four children with this third wife, Susan B. Bates, nine children total, and he named parents-in-law ("History of Weymouth", vol. 3. on and near p.110).
Chamberlain's history has a peculiarity. He relied on an older Vital Records book for Weymouth that had both a bonus and a flaw.
The bonus? More gravestones were still clear and unbroken then than now, more birth years or ages were still readable. Once stones lost readability, books like his could be consulted.
The flaw? A lack of clarity on birth source. Whenever infant baptism/birth records were missing from church and town, the town clerks substituted a gravestone's birth year. ()It was either stone-carved or, more often, calculated from age at death. Each such entry ended with an abbreviation for the stone's local graveyard. The graveyard was only way you could tell it was stone information, apart from the fact that parents' names were missing. Because the abbreviations were minimal, lots of readers did not know that they signaled a gravestone only, no birth record.
This created a false impression. People born elsewhere but who died in Weymouth were treated as born in Weymouth.
BEWARE: Weymouth's "false births" were passed up to the county/state level, in addition to "true births". How to detect? First, too many birthplaces will be given as Weymouth, especially for families that moved around.
One sign? No parent is listed. (The Weymouth infant baptizing churches ALWAYS named at least one parent, sometimes a grandparent if a child's mother died and the father was away sailing or in the military. The baptism was a commitment made in public to raise the child well, parent or a guardian's names were deemed essential.)
In practice, what does this mean? Whenever finding a birth source that says Weymouth, but that gives no names for parents, a non-Weymouth source must be found.
These could be a family history by in-laws from out-of-town or out-of-state. For these Blanchards, with Wife1's parents born in NH and herself in Maine, the source was by in-law Dean Dudley. Done while Alexander and his eldest children lived, it stated Alexander and the first children were also born in Maine, not Weymouth as many claim. It gave different towns inside Maine. It was a sign of accuracy, to not "simply assume" the same town for everyone.
Alex's last four children were by Susan. They were all infant-baptized, with at least one parent named. There is no doubt they were Weymouth births.
The childrens' names were repeated online at genealogy.com by Ward-E-Hobby, in his Blanchard tree, generally very well-done. Its main error is the same, found in other people's trees: Listing too many who died in Weymouth as also born in Weymouth.
Alexander had first married Sarah Dudley in Phillips, Franklin County, Maine, on June 30, 1822. Their five known children were born 1823-1834, all in Maine, according to Dean Dudley's book.
Alexander's last wife, Susan Bates, was not a Dudley. She and her children were not in Dudley's book. Those second children were a second family, born 1841-1846, those truly all in Weymouth. There was a seven-year gap between the two sets of children. However, some of the older set would stay with Susan and Alex, well into adulthood.
Susan named two of her children Leonard after a Blanchard uncle. Only Leonard Wesley Blanchard, her fourth child, lived to adulthood. The name Wesley is a sign of Methodism, as an early leader was John Wesley, who led a saintly life.
These three of Susan's four died as infants:
Their first Leonard Blanchard (1841-1841);
Wilbur Fiske Blanchard (1845-1846);
Sarah Wilbur Blanchard(1846-1847).
The "Vital Records of Weymouth Through 1850" book, not printed until 1910, gave measles for one, croup for another, and a third unspecified, as to cause of death. There were no vaccinations yet. If a child was already weakened by an earlier flu, a case of "croup" (diphtheria?) or measles could kill.
There may have been inexpensive "footstones" with names for the infants, instead of larger headstones. A problem? Footstones in some other local cemeteries, such as the Elm Street Cemetery in the neighboring town of Braintree, were known to have been gathered up and tossed to make machine-mowing easier.
Fiske and Wilbur were surnames re-used as middle names. They might name a mother and grandmother on Susan's side, just as Susan's middle "B" possibly stood for Bicknell, another maternal surname. We, as of 2016, have no other clues to her parents' ancestry.
===================================================
Her only child to survive through much, not all of the Civil War?
"BIRTHS"
"Blanchard (see Blanchar, Blancher, Blancherd, Blanchers, Blanchord)"
"Leonard Wesley, s. Alexander, mariner, and Susan, June 13, 1843"
Source: 1910 book, "Vital Records of Weymouth Through 1850", page 50.
===================================================
(In Progress...THIS REFERENCE SECTION WILL BE DELETED AFTER WE FIND STONES. The Elm Street Cemetery was examined by an archeologist who said the footstones were gathered an tossed in a pile, first names on them divorced from parents and surnames on the main stone. That cemetery's front, now APPEARING almost empty, was actually once so crowded, they closed the old cemetery to new burials, opened more land behind it, which also filled up, but had newer stones, so more of the main stones lasted. The burials were across from the Second Church of Braintree, letting mourners walk a coffin to its grave. Was this done for Alex and for Susan? Or was Fairmount, located out in East Weymouth, too far from their church? After all the TB and infant deaths and moves out west, was anyone left to walk Susan's coffin to her grave?
Alex's nephews went west, lie buried in Minnesota. The "church-facing-cemetery" setup still exists in their little town of Utica, MN. Utica's declared denomination was Presbyterian, but its Puritan-descended were of a tolerant sort, as they intermarried with Norwegians and Germans.
As Massachusetts slowly ended its church-state ties, denominations were declared in most places, but not in Weymouth. In neighboring Braintree, the second church declared itself First Congregational of Braintree, but only after its earlier first church to the north had turned Unitarian. Unitarian meant, among other differences, believing in God as a unity, without Christ and Spirit personalities, so no Trinity to contemplate. The First and Second Churches of Weymouth did not want to be seen as Unitarian. They did not want to declare a specific denomination either. A denomination forced some to leave, seen especially at the Unitarian church. So...they put Christ in their names and became First and Second Church of Christ of Weymouth instead. In modern times, the first or north one has joined with the Congregational churches, is again called First Weymouth. The second or south one merged with what were called Union churches, representing, for example, a union of people too distant from all neighboring town-authorized churches, in their case, too far from the second churches of both Braintree and Weymouth to be well-served by either, pre-automobile. With the auto, the old Union and South or Second Weymouth churches could merge and became South Union Church. They've kept the South Union name and have merged with the Congregational The combined result is now United Church of Christ as a denomination. The North Weymouth cemetery was on the site of the first Weymouth church's first meeting house.
Alex and Susan's cemetery of Fairmount is hard to place with a specific church?
To check. Do ANY photos for this cemetery show ANY footstones? ANY infant burials, as all cemeteries normally have some infants buried?)
Alex would have seen the infants die. The three sons living to adulthood still lived with him and Susan in their last US Census together. That was the 1850, naming his occupation as a "master mariner", mere months before he himself died.
The two eldest, Horatio and Marcellus, by first wife Sarah Dudley, were mariners like their father. Susan's second Leonard, a namesake for the one lost as an infant, was luckier than the baby who died. He would not die until the Civil War: FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-64J9-2JX
The 1850 Census took people by surprise. It asked people a question not asked in earlier censuses, where they were born. The census-taker would be in a hurry, so people would make a guess. There are patterns to the guesses, with even mistakes giving information. Children especially guessed their parents were born at some place they'd heard discussed.
This tendency to guess, which was stronger for the 1850 than for any later ones, and stronger for newlyweds doing their first census, caused whichever son answered the door for the Blanchards in 1850 to mix up the parents' birthplaces. The answerer said Susan was born in Maine, but Alex in Massachusetts. We know from Susan's written records, which match her parents' burial in Pembroke, that the answer for her was Massachusetts. By the next Census, relatives would have asked someone who knew and had better answers.
At 17, for the 1860 US Census in Weymouth, Leonard was still with his mother, Susan, now a widow,. Susan would correct the error of the last census by giving her birthplace as Massachusetts, not Maine
How had she made ends meet?
The census-takers then often pretended women had no occupation. The 1860 thus listed none for her, as if she and a young son, only been eight when his father died, had lived on air and fairy tale wishes since Alexander's death. From the circumstances, with seven strangers living in their house, ages 16-30, we assume what the census-taker refused to say. She supported herself. She did so as she took in boarders. She would be able to make more money by serving them meals and doing their laundry, than merely by renting them rooms. The census-taker's writing is flowery, hard to read, but Leonard, now 17, may have helped out, once older, by working as a mason:
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9BS3-WCP?mode=g&i=23
Interestingly, spouse Alexander's male heirs named Blanchard did not come from his sons, but his daughter. She was not an unwed mother, but instead married her cousin, a son of his brother Noah. All three of the young Blanchard sons seen with Alexander in the 1850 Census would die "too soon". Two would die in the years of the Civil War, allowing them to be in the 1860 Census. One did not make it into that Census, so he must have died before 1860.
For Marcellus, staying in marine work proved dangerous. Weather alone could lead a ship to ruin, in a day with little equipment to "see in the dark". Sarah Dudley's Marcellus thus would die "at sea". His death date not stated in any easily found source, but no 1860 census is found for him.
Family trees give an imprecise date for Susan's longest-living child, Leonard Wesley Blanchard. They merely say 1864, a Civil War year, with no month or place specified. There is no Massachusetts death record for him. However, a national record indicates he died in Oct. of 1864, in a NY military hospital temporarily erected on an island.
Alexander's son Leonard Wesley seems to be the "Wesley Blanchard", age about 18, who died on Oct. 14 of 1864, at David's Island in New York, presumedly injured earlier. That location is off the coast, outside NYC and New Rochelle, NY, in the Long Island area. The government rented the island for a military hospital, beginning in 1862, then owned it for some time after. Wiki's history writers said DeCamp General Hospital was "erected to house thousands of wounded prisoners from the battlefields of the American Civil War." Other sources say many deceased would be buried in a national cemetery on Long Island hurriedly put together around 1862, with other cemeteries added later (not clear if all early graves were marked).
Was there another Wesley Blanchard about the same age to confuse the issue? We've found only one similar in age. His death is accounted for elsewhere and was much later. He was the half-nephew named Wesley Blanchard born in Maine, not Massachusetts. That Wesley's mother was Leonard's significantly older half-sister, Elizabeth. She married very young, to another Blanchard, a cousin, at about age of 15. We can imagine her grieving and looking for love, as her marriage was in the year after her mother's death. Unlike too many who marry too young, she had a long and solid marriage with J.K., Joseph Knapp Blanchard. They would take in strays, the children of relatives whose parents had died and were themselves sick, as the poorly understood contagion of consumption (TB) took its huge toll on this family. She returned to Maine to live her life with J.K., where her son Wesley, who was Alexander's grandson, would be born after some others. Her son would be luckier than Alexander's own sons and the many consumption victims in the family. Her Wesley would live past age 60.
That leaves Alexander's son Horatio. Sarah's Horatio Nelson Blanchard died December 17, 1863, at age 29 years, 1 month and 11 days. Horatio would manage to live independently, seen in a state census in 1855 as "Nelson Blanchard", born Maine, boarding with a Tirrell family in Weymouth. He would marry, in mid-1860. That marriage timing was used by many young men expecting to go off to war. He married Ruth Maria Shaw, born in Weymouth, 19 to his 26, daughter of Oran P. or S. and Elizabeth Shaw.
Interestingly, Horatio gave his father's name as Capt. Marcellus Blanchard on the notice of intention, two days before the wedding, on June 1. On the actual wedding date, June 3, the clerk simply wrote Capt. Alex. He and Ruth would have a daughter, Lizzie Nelson Blanchard, but he never knew her. She was born March 14, 1864, some months after his death, but her father listed as if alive, a shoemaker born in Maine, mother Ruth Shaw, born in Weymouth.
Horatio's death record said he died of "consumption", their word for TB. That not only made him too sick to go to war, but also too weak to continue as a mariner. His occupation at death was one that could be done sitting down, a boot maker. His record gave his parents as Alexander and Sarah, and said he had been born in Freeman, Maine. Both his parents were deceased, so someone took a guess as to their birthplaces and said Weymouth:
DEATH: FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-68Y7-XN
Was Horatio named for Admiral Horatio Nelson of the British Royal Navy? Leonard's middle name of Wesley might have marked a switch from Puritan affiliations to Methodist. Horatio had the opportunity to marry before leaving for War, so he did.
Skip to ...Bottom (Grave List)
===================================
LOOSE ENDS--FAMILY. (To be pared down drastically after more links to family are made.)
IMMIGRANT ANCESTORS.
MOTHER'S. On her mother's side, varied sources say three Howlands had immigrated early, but separately, to the Plymouth colony. John, Arthur and Henry were guessed to be brothers, perhaps all sons of Henry Howland of Fen Stanton, England. If not wealthy, young men could not pay their own way, but worked for passage, with John said, at MinerDescent.com, to be an assistant to the minister on the Mayflower. Elizabeth Pearson White, an Illinois genealogist who died in 2011 at age 90, wrote a book about him, with web sites quoting this part:
"John Howland of the Mayflower was called by Governor William Bradford 'a lusty younge man'. He was one of the hired hands among the Mayflower company, being neither a 'Saint', as the Pilgrims were called, nor a 'Stranger', engaged for a specific duty, as was the soldier, Captain Myles Standish."
Modern researchers Tom Howland and Raymond T. Wing learned that Howland is a place name, meaning land on a ridge. As a place name, it shows multiple male DNAs.
Seven or eight unrelated sets ("haplogroups") have been counted for Howlands teted thus far (by 2016, in Howland and Ring's name study at FamilyTreeDNAcom). The Plymouth ones were almost all of haplogroup "R-M269", with one close match also labeled as "RZ". Some of their matches did not leave England. One matching family somehow ended in Spain; another migrated from MA to Kentucky. The other haplogroups are not Plymouth/Fen Stanton matches, so neither R-M269 nor RZ. They have too few test-takers so far to draw conclusions.
FATHER'S. The Bates immigrated to places northward of Plymouth County. They were early of Weymouth, so closer to Boston, yet south of it. Other Bates thought to be unrelated were early to Boston proper.
SPOUSE ALEXANDER. Alexander's town before their marriage became Susan's town after marriage. His parents had married and baptized children in the south parish (Second Church) of Weymouth much earlier, before his parents took his older siblings to Maine. Born in Maine, he was of record as a military musician from Pittston, Maine, at a young age, in 1814. (Their young were recruited as the War of 1812 deepened.)
He returned to Weymouth decades later. This happened relatively quickly after his first wife's death back in Maine. His occupation as a mariner made trips easier than if he had been kept in one place by farming or a mill.
Was he anxious to find a mother for his Maine-born children? His mother was also deceased, not able to help him out with childcare. He soon married his second wife, Sarah Hovey Thayer, in Weymouth, in Sept. of 1839. Prior relationships may have produced that marriage, as his mother had also been a Thayer, and that Sarah's mother had been another Blanchard. If anyone worried about the children to come, it was moot, as they had none. At that marriage, he was still listed as from "Freeman, Maine", where his parents last lived. (Newly annexed by Franklin County in 1835, their township had been in Somerset County when his mother died and, before that, Kennebec and, earlier still, Lincoln County. His parents' last location, it was a township with changing bosses and thus with some records mis-placed by changes in courthouses. Their tiny hamlet was North Freeman. It had a sawmill and, for a time, a narrow gauge railroad used as an excursion train for enjoying scenery and making fishing trips. Its short line went to nearby Kingfield and a few other places inside Maine. Towns would depopulate after he left, for varied reasons.)
Second wife Sarah died quickly. Alexander married again, this Susan B. Bates, merely a year after his second marriage. By then, he was a resident of Weymouth in his own right. Again, did prior relationships matter in making their match? A prior Susannah Bates had been an ancestor to Alexander five generations back.
IN MAINE. Alex's parents moved to Maine before 1800, according to G. Chamberlain's old "History of Weymouth". Varied Maine histories indicate they followed some others to Pittston who had left Weymouth earlier. Alex was born in Pittston, verified by Chamberlain.
His family farmed newly-opened land in interior Maine, won previously from the British and French and native tribes, after many decades of warring. (Many to live on the emerging US side of Canada either received land directly or from their parents, under paperwork called "bounty warrants", or they bought from people who had inherited such warrants. The warrants were regarded as making-up for the heirs' fathers serving in the acquiring wars as soldiers, generally soldiering without pay or paid in worthless "scrip", unable to pay mortgages back home, often causing foreclosures. Unlike others not so rewarded, the "lucky ones" to receive land bounties had served under politically well-connected military leaders. The well-connected could arrange for the bounties for their soldiers and, at times, for entirely new daughter towns for their old Massachusetts communities. major portions of Maine had once been inside old Massachusetts. These things combined to cause many Maine towns to be named for Massachusetts towns.)
In Maine, the others arriving first to their part also farmed. Some ran mills, saw and grist, as side businesses. River traffic allowed boating/ferrying/barging as occupations. The Penobscot River was later to have steamboats making their way to Boston, via Bangor on the coast, before the eras of railroads and then semi-trucks on freeways handled more traffic. The big river's connection to the sea helps us understand Alexander as "mariner", the occupation listed on his death record.
IN MASSACHUSETTS. Alex's father was described by G. Chamberlain as Nicholas Blanchard the junior while living in Weymouth. (Nicholas was husband to Mary Thayer, son to Nicholas the senior and another, different Sarah Hovey.)
Junior's household was not present in Weymouth for its 1800 US Census, so they had moved before then. The census in 1790 listed his household in Weymouth, side-by-side with one headed by a Nicholas Blanchard the senior. Other Blanchards were on the same page, listed in "visitation" order, so perhaps living along the same road. (Surveys were a new idea, needing instruction. The forms were totally handwritten in 1790, not pre-published with blanks for the surveyor to fill in. Too many still could not read and write. The census-takers thus visited houses and took answers orally, moving down a road, house-to-house.)
Those households with young members seemed of the right age to be the junior's brothers. They also could have included cousins or young uncles.
Alex's parents left their last vital record in a Weymouth church in 1797. That was at Second Church, for the infant baptism of Alex's next older brother, Noah Blanchard. Like most of their siblings, Noah stayed in interior Maine. Their scenic lumber-milling area was made into new counties as their tiny hamlets grew in number, with the boundaries revised later, artificially splitting families apart. All siblings were at one point in old Somerset County. Then, some townships of Somerset were annexed by other counties. Most of their siblings thus died in Franklin County, in Kingfield if not in Freeman. Noah had not moved far, merely to Farmington and then to Lewiston, Maine, according to Chamberlain. However, his portion of old former Somerset County would be put into Androscoggin County. The county changes were in 1835, so after the death of Alexander's mother in 1829, but before the death of his first wife.
His old support system was thus "chopped up" both by politicians and by death. We assume relatives back in Weymouth became matchmakers, so his later marriages were in Weymouth.
The authorized attendance area for Second Church was the South Parish of Weymouth, made legal by an act of the colony's legislature in the early 1720s, needed earlier, authorized only to relieve population pressure at the First Church. Nicholas the senior's grandfather, one of the early John Blanchards, had moved from north to south inside old Weymouth, as part of the making of a daughter settlement. That was about 10 years before the Second Church was authorized. Too distant to easily attend the First Church, they would be "churchless" in the meantime. Some family records in the churchless years are thus found at neighboring Braintree, with a church closer-by. The Second would not receive any of Weymouth's town taxes until the 1760s. Despite having to cut corners, it managed to keep better books on its baptisms, with only four years said to be missing, said Chamberlain. (A former principal at Hunt School, he would have been well aware of which families' records were too scant. Due to Chamberlain covering more of them, more is known about the early Blanchards than about the Bates. The Bates were split between Weymouth and Pembroke. Chamberlain ignored Pembroke. )
Ahead of Chamberlain writing his history, both Pembroke and Weymouth made books for local "Vital Records through 1850". The 1850 cut-off date almost excluded Alexander's stone, and did exclude Susan's.
Town clerks and committees compiled the results, gathering up and organizing town and church records. There were "holes" to be filled. Careless pastors had taken records with them when they moved. For a temporary time, the intolerants among the adult baptizers had driven the infant baptizers out of First Church at Weymouth. There was the permanent problem of missing birth material for children of adult baptizers (with the tolerant ones allowed to stay after the infant-baptizing majority took their church back and the town kicked out the intolerant minority).
To fill the holes in births, they checked graveyards, finding stones then, that are missing now, 100 years later, and inferred birth year from age at death, if needed. This caused Alexander's stone to be listed under the Birth Records in Weymouth's book. That caused the mistaken idea that he had been born in Weymouth, not Maine.
They accepted family records. The Weymouth Bates were among ones to submit records to Weymouth. The Pembroke Bates were less well-covered, so Susan's grandparent Bates are uncertain.
(The Eddy Town Records Fund financed the two books' publishing by the New England Genealogical Society, with Pembroke's printed in 1911. The Weymouth area's historian, George Chamberlain, saw his book published in 1923, by the Weymouth Historical Society. )
===
THAYER IN-LAWS. Alex's mother, Mary Thayer, being female and leaving the area, was a poorly known individual inside a locally well-known family. Perhaps baptized as Maribah, perhaps a daughter of a Noah Thayer, neither of those things about her are certain, as dates or namings are "off a bit". Her Thayers, like his Blanchards, were also from Norfolk County.
With some in her ancestors' large families connected to ship-building, Mary's prior generations located a bit upstream of Weymouth. Theirs was the old town of Braintree, on the north side of the wide Weymouth River, beginning where Weymouth Landing ended. (Weymouth proper was on the south side of the salty/saline part of the big "fore" river. Weymouth's big harbor accessed the sea. Plymouth county wound around Weymouth and Norfolk's lower edge, trying to gain maximum access to the Atlantic Ocean.)
The places of the Bates and Blanchards and Thayers all started as rural "towns", more like townships with hamlets inside, one subsidized church per town/township. After the era of trappers and traders and workers mining bog iron, which included some "husbanding" animal herds in marsh pastures, their country places filled with regular small farmers and their mills and orchards. Inns and taverns sprung up around mills and churches, so farmers could wait for milling to finish and families could attend a faraway church for an infant's baptism or a relative's marriage or funeral. These were well-remembered events, considered "vital" to the ongoing life of the community, so written down.
Being a mariner or shipbuilder, or working as such in the off-season after summer farming, was also a choice. Blue collar work, such as quarrying in the Blue Hills and blacksmithing, let more permanently stop farming early. They slowly became more urban, with shoemaking a common "cottage industry" before the advent of factories. Their old factories mostly gone, these places are now all varied suburbs, south to southeast of Boston.
"Susan B. Bates Blanchard"
Weymouth, 1885, January.
Died the 11th, of record the 13th.
Widowed, age 74 years, 3 months, 7 days.
Cause Pneumonia
Her survivors, giving information for the record, believed that she and both of her parents, Edward Bates and Margaret Howland, had been born at Pembroke. Her parents lie buried there, their stones still clearly readable.
HER DEATH SOURCE: "Massachusetts Deaths, 1841-1915", handwritten list, line 9. Image last archived Dec., 2014, FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-DHF3-XHZ
BIRTH NOTE: Oct. 4 is a likely birth date, calculated by subtracting her age at death from date of death. Using just the month signals it is a calculation.)
===================================
Third wife of mariner Capt. Alexander Blanchard, she would become a second mother for the younger ones among his prior children. She would bear her own children as well, with only one living to adulthood, but then dying in a Civil War year, leaving her a widow with no survivors.
MARRIAGE. Both their churches/towns recorded their intent to marry ("banns"), with the marriage following, so their marriage year as 1840 is found multiple times. Reading "banns"/intent at both places, bride's church and groom's church, in theory, gave an opportunity for prior spouses, etc., to raise objections. Prior spouses presumed dead usually were, in fact, dead, so usually no one objected. The wedding was often at the church of the bride, true for her. She called him "Alex" when filing for marriage at her own church, in Pembroke, in Plymouth County.
HER NAME. "Susan" began as a nickname for Susannah.
The Bates and Blanchard trees began intertwining when the first Susannah Bates in Weymouth married Alexander Blanchard's immigrant ancestor, Nathaniel Blanchard. His immigrant father, Thomas Blanchard, "brought over" Nathaniel at about age 7, with several brothers.
A Susannah Bicknell Bates lies buried in the same cemetery as spouse Alexander. Born in 1794, given the nickname Susan, she was of the right age to be a younger cousin or even a sister to this Susan's father. (Susan's father, Edward, was born around 1781.) Was this Susan B. a namesake for Susannah Bicknell?
HUSBAND'S GRAVESTONE. Her husband, Alexander Blanchard, died decades before Susan. As a mariner, he was better able than many to move around, to go and fro, between Maine and Massachusetts. His children across three wives can be counted like this:
Wife1, long-enough marriage to have five children, born Maine, married Maine, according to a Dudley family history, Alex's stone acts as a cenotaph, repeating the information seen in two other sources that Wife1 died in Maine.
Wife2, too-short marriage, zero children, born Weymouth, married Weymouth, reportedly died in Maine in the year after marriage. The source for the death location is not the stone stating her name, but a record book. It gave Freeman, Maine, for both her death place and for his residence at the time they married, presumedly so his first five children would not have to leave their home. We assume she is buried here in Massachusetts, but her mention on his stone could be just a cenotaph.
Wife3, this Susan, longtime marriage with four children, died Weymouth.
Made of a firmer rock than limestone, the words on Alexander's stone are clearer than seen on many gravestones of its age. His stone lists his two prior wives, Sarah Dudley, whose true stone has been found at her burial place in Maine, and Sarah Hovey Thayer, for whom a mention at his is the only stone found as of 2016.
More importantly, someone left room on the stone for his third wife, this Susan. She survived him, so would have been the one ordering his stone, asking that space be left for her "when her time came". Yet, the space for her has been left blank.
If no survivors were still local after she died in her 70s, the town would have buried her there, but would not have paid for her marker. For the moment, her burial is treated as unplaced. If we find that there were no related survivors (siblings) on her Bates side as well, we'll assume she was buried here, but that funds were exhausted, so no carving was made.
THEIR KNOWN CHILDREN; HISTORY BONUSES & FLAWS. George Walter Chamberlain, a former Weymouth school principal, wrote a history of Weymouth in the 1920s. He included the Blanchards of Weymouth and Maine. He wrote 70-90 years after the death of Alex and Wife1, so relied on a Vital Records book for old Weymouth.
Chamberlain was thorough and understood local church history, so could track families by church and not just by town, needed to make sense of early "birth records" that were collected at infant baptisms. Two town-authorized churches were built earliest, "First" for north and significantly later, "Second" for south. Then came two "union" churches, along the edges of Weymouth, as fringe areas avoided earlier began to fill-in.
Chamberlain understood that the old King's church had more members in Weymouth than normal for a strongly Puritan town. (Were their early church/chapel records of baptism and marriages burned in the American Revolution?)
In general, Methodists were initially a praying club or praying society inside the King's Church. Those in Britain were eventually kicked out of the King's Church after they took over pulpits and preached that anyone not adhering to emerging Methodist views was wrong. (Did that happen here, too? Not as much? If the Methodist clubs/societies here were more tolerant?)
Post-American Revolution, the societies not loyal to the King, yet not willing to turn Calvinist, seeing the latter as too negative in its views of human nature and free will, made their own churches. As long as First and Second Church did not declare denominations, was it possible for the early Methodists to form a society inside? Served by traveling ministers? Or...? Many in Weymouth and neighboring Pembroke would join a Methodist-Episcopalian (ME) denomination eventually, with the Methodist side more country, accordingly poorer and plainer to match farmers' pocketbooks, while the Episcopalian end was more city, better off, so could be more ornate and have more variety in services. Three Rev. Bates in the Weymouth-Pembroke area were circuit-riding minsters ("itinerant" or traveling) for the Methodist-Episcopal church. They may have been cousins to Sarah, but too many early records for her own parents have been lost to know this for certain.
Chamberlain was thorough. He listed both Alexander's known five children with first wife Sarah Dudley, plus Alexander's known four children with this third wife, Susan B. Bates, nine children total, and he named parents-in-law ("History of Weymouth", vol. 3. on and near p.110).
Chamberlain's history has a peculiarity. He relied on an older Vital Records book for Weymouth that had both a bonus and a flaw.
The bonus? More gravestones were still clear and unbroken then than now, more birth years or ages were still readable. Once stones lost readability, books like his could be consulted.
The flaw? A lack of clarity on birth source. Whenever infant baptism/birth records were missing from church and town, the town clerks substituted a gravestone's birth year. ()It was either stone-carved or, more often, calculated from age at death. Each such entry ended with an abbreviation for the stone's local graveyard. The graveyard was only way you could tell it was stone information, apart from the fact that parents' names were missing. Because the abbreviations were minimal, lots of readers did not know that they signaled a gravestone only, no birth record.
This created a false impression. People born elsewhere but who died in Weymouth were treated as born in Weymouth.
BEWARE: Weymouth's "false births" were passed up to the county/state level, in addition to "true births". How to detect? First, too many birthplaces will be given as Weymouth, especially for families that moved around.
One sign? No parent is listed. (The Weymouth infant baptizing churches ALWAYS named at least one parent, sometimes a grandparent if a child's mother died and the father was away sailing or in the military. The baptism was a commitment made in public to raise the child well, parent or a guardian's names were deemed essential.)
In practice, what does this mean? Whenever finding a birth source that says Weymouth, but that gives no names for parents, a non-Weymouth source must be found.
These could be a family history by in-laws from out-of-town or out-of-state. For these Blanchards, with Wife1's parents born in NH and herself in Maine, the source was by in-law Dean Dudley. Done while Alexander and his eldest children lived, it stated Alexander and the first children were also born in Maine, not Weymouth as many claim. It gave different towns inside Maine. It was a sign of accuracy, to not "simply assume" the same town for everyone.
Alex's last four children were by Susan. They were all infant-baptized, with at least one parent named. There is no doubt they were Weymouth births.
The childrens' names were repeated online at genealogy.com by Ward-E-Hobby, in his Blanchard tree, generally very well-done. Its main error is the same, found in other people's trees: Listing too many who died in Weymouth as also born in Weymouth.
Alexander had first married Sarah Dudley in Phillips, Franklin County, Maine, on June 30, 1822. Their five known children were born 1823-1834, all in Maine, according to Dean Dudley's book.
Alexander's last wife, Susan Bates, was not a Dudley. She and her children were not in Dudley's book. Those second children were a second family, born 1841-1846, those truly all in Weymouth. There was a seven-year gap between the two sets of children. However, some of the older set would stay with Susan and Alex, well into adulthood.
Susan named two of her children Leonard after a Blanchard uncle. Only Leonard Wesley Blanchard, her fourth child, lived to adulthood. The name Wesley is a sign of Methodism, as an early leader was John Wesley, who led a saintly life.
These three of Susan's four died as infants:
Their first Leonard Blanchard (1841-1841);
Wilbur Fiske Blanchard (1845-1846);
Sarah Wilbur Blanchard(1846-1847).
The "Vital Records of Weymouth Through 1850" book, not printed until 1910, gave measles for one, croup for another, and a third unspecified, as to cause of death. There were no vaccinations yet. If a child was already weakened by an earlier flu, a case of "croup" (diphtheria?) or measles could kill.
There may have been inexpensive "footstones" with names for the infants, instead of larger headstones. A problem? Footstones in some other local cemeteries, such as the Elm Street Cemetery in the neighboring town of Braintree, were known to have been gathered up and tossed to make machine-mowing easier.
Fiske and Wilbur were surnames re-used as middle names. They might name a mother and grandmother on Susan's side, just as Susan's middle "B" possibly stood for Bicknell, another maternal surname. We, as of 2016, have no other clues to her parents' ancestry.
===================================================
Her only child to survive through much, not all of the Civil War?
"BIRTHS"
"Blanchard (see Blanchar, Blancher, Blancherd, Blanchers, Blanchord)"
"Leonard Wesley, s. Alexander, mariner, and Susan, June 13, 1843"
Source: 1910 book, "Vital Records of Weymouth Through 1850", page 50.
===================================================
(In Progress...THIS REFERENCE SECTION WILL BE DELETED AFTER WE FIND STONES. The Elm Street Cemetery was examined by an archeologist who said the footstones were gathered an tossed in a pile, first names on them divorced from parents and surnames on the main stone. That cemetery's front, now APPEARING almost empty, was actually once so crowded, they closed the old cemetery to new burials, opened more land behind it, which also filled up, but had newer stones, so more of the main stones lasted. The burials were across from the Second Church of Braintree, letting mourners walk a coffin to its grave. Was this done for Alex and for Susan? Or was Fairmount, located out in East Weymouth, too far from their church? After all the TB and infant deaths and moves out west, was anyone left to walk Susan's coffin to her grave?
Alex's nephews went west, lie buried in Minnesota. The "church-facing-cemetery" setup still exists in their little town of Utica, MN. Utica's declared denomination was Presbyterian, but its Puritan-descended were of a tolerant sort, as they intermarried with Norwegians and Germans.
As Massachusetts slowly ended its church-state ties, denominations were declared in most places, but not in Weymouth. In neighboring Braintree, the second church declared itself First Congregational of Braintree, but only after its earlier first church to the north had turned Unitarian. Unitarian meant, among other differences, believing in God as a unity, without Christ and Spirit personalities, so no Trinity to contemplate. The First and Second Churches of Weymouth did not want to be seen as Unitarian. They did not want to declare a specific denomination either. A denomination forced some to leave, seen especially at the Unitarian church. So...they put Christ in their names and became First and Second Church of Christ of Weymouth instead. In modern times, the first or north one has joined with the Congregational churches, is again called First Weymouth. The second or south one merged with what were called Union churches, representing, for example, a union of people too distant from all neighboring town-authorized churches, in their case, too far from the second churches of both Braintree and Weymouth to be well-served by either, pre-automobile. With the auto, the old Union and South or Second Weymouth churches could merge and became South Union Church. They've kept the South Union name and have merged with the Congregational The combined result is now United Church of Christ as a denomination. The North Weymouth cemetery was on the site of the first Weymouth church's first meeting house.
Alex and Susan's cemetery of Fairmount is hard to place with a specific church?
To check. Do ANY photos for this cemetery show ANY footstones? ANY infant burials, as all cemeteries normally have some infants buried?)
Alex would have seen the infants die. The three sons living to adulthood still lived with him and Susan in their last US Census together. That was the 1850, naming his occupation as a "master mariner", mere months before he himself died.
The two eldest, Horatio and Marcellus, by first wife Sarah Dudley, were mariners like their father. Susan's second Leonard, a namesake for the one lost as an infant, was luckier than the baby who died. He would not die until the Civil War: FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-64J9-2JX
The 1850 Census took people by surprise. It asked people a question not asked in earlier censuses, where they were born. The census-taker would be in a hurry, so people would make a guess. There are patterns to the guesses, with even mistakes giving information. Children especially guessed their parents were born at some place they'd heard discussed.
This tendency to guess, which was stronger for the 1850 than for any later ones, and stronger for newlyweds doing their first census, caused whichever son answered the door for the Blanchards in 1850 to mix up the parents' birthplaces. The answerer said Susan was born in Maine, but Alex in Massachusetts. We know from Susan's written records, which match her parents' burial in Pembroke, that the answer for her was Massachusetts. By the next Census, relatives would have asked someone who knew and had better answers.
At 17, for the 1860 US Census in Weymouth, Leonard was still with his mother, Susan, now a widow,. Susan would correct the error of the last census by giving her birthplace as Massachusetts, not Maine
How had she made ends meet?
The census-takers then often pretended women had no occupation. The 1860 thus listed none for her, as if she and a young son, only been eight when his father died, had lived on air and fairy tale wishes since Alexander's death. From the circumstances, with seven strangers living in their house, ages 16-30, we assume what the census-taker refused to say. She supported herself. She did so as she took in boarders. She would be able to make more money by serving them meals and doing their laundry, than merely by renting them rooms. The census-taker's writing is flowery, hard to read, but Leonard, now 17, may have helped out, once older, by working as a mason:
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9BS3-WCP?mode=g&i=23
Interestingly, spouse Alexander's male heirs named Blanchard did not come from his sons, but his daughter. She was not an unwed mother, but instead married her cousin, a son of his brother Noah. All three of the young Blanchard sons seen with Alexander in the 1850 Census would die "too soon". Two would die in the years of the Civil War, allowing them to be in the 1860 Census. One did not make it into that Census, so he must have died before 1860.
For Marcellus, staying in marine work proved dangerous. Weather alone could lead a ship to ruin, in a day with little equipment to "see in the dark". Sarah Dudley's Marcellus thus would die "at sea". His death date not stated in any easily found source, but no 1860 census is found for him.
Family trees give an imprecise date for Susan's longest-living child, Leonard Wesley Blanchard. They merely say 1864, a Civil War year, with no month or place specified. There is no Massachusetts death record for him. However, a national record indicates he died in Oct. of 1864, in a NY military hospital temporarily erected on an island.
Alexander's son Leonard Wesley seems to be the "Wesley Blanchard", age about 18, who died on Oct. 14 of 1864, at David's Island in New York, presumedly injured earlier. That location is off the coast, outside NYC and New Rochelle, NY, in the Long Island area. The government rented the island for a military hospital, beginning in 1862, then owned it for some time after. Wiki's history writers said DeCamp General Hospital was "erected to house thousands of wounded prisoners from the battlefields of the American Civil War." Other sources say many deceased would be buried in a national cemetery on Long Island hurriedly put together around 1862, with other cemeteries added later (not clear if all early graves were marked).
Was there another Wesley Blanchard about the same age to confuse the issue? We've found only one similar in age. His death is accounted for elsewhere and was much later. He was the half-nephew named Wesley Blanchard born in Maine, not Massachusetts. That Wesley's mother was Leonard's significantly older half-sister, Elizabeth. She married very young, to another Blanchard, a cousin, at about age of 15. We can imagine her grieving and looking for love, as her marriage was in the year after her mother's death. Unlike too many who marry too young, she had a long and solid marriage with J.K., Joseph Knapp Blanchard. They would take in strays, the children of relatives whose parents had died and were themselves sick, as the poorly understood contagion of consumption (TB) took its huge toll on this family. She returned to Maine to live her life with J.K., where her son Wesley, who was Alexander's grandson, would be born after some others. Her son would be luckier than Alexander's own sons and the many consumption victims in the family. Her Wesley would live past age 60.
That leaves Alexander's son Horatio. Sarah's Horatio Nelson Blanchard died December 17, 1863, at age 29 years, 1 month and 11 days. Horatio would manage to live independently, seen in a state census in 1855 as "Nelson Blanchard", born Maine, boarding with a Tirrell family in Weymouth. He would marry, in mid-1860. That marriage timing was used by many young men expecting to go off to war. He married Ruth Maria Shaw, born in Weymouth, 19 to his 26, daughter of Oran P. or S. and Elizabeth Shaw.
Interestingly, Horatio gave his father's name as Capt. Marcellus Blanchard on the notice of intention, two days before the wedding, on June 1. On the actual wedding date, June 3, the clerk simply wrote Capt. Alex. He and Ruth would have a daughter, Lizzie Nelson Blanchard, but he never knew her. She was born March 14, 1864, some months after his death, but her father listed as if alive, a shoemaker born in Maine, mother Ruth Shaw, born in Weymouth.
Horatio's death record said he died of "consumption", their word for TB. That not only made him too sick to go to war, but also too weak to continue as a mariner. His occupation at death was one that could be done sitting down, a boot maker. His record gave his parents as Alexander and Sarah, and said he had been born in Freeman, Maine. Both his parents were deceased, so someone took a guess as to their birthplaces and said Weymouth:
DEATH: FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-68Y7-XN
Was Horatio named for Admiral Horatio Nelson of the British Royal Navy? Leonard's middle name of Wesley might have marked a switch from Puritan affiliations to Methodist. Horatio had the opportunity to marry before leaving for War, so he did.
Skip to ...Bottom (Grave List)
===================================
LOOSE ENDS--FAMILY. (To be pared down drastically after more links to family are made.)
IMMIGRANT ANCESTORS.
MOTHER'S. On her mother's side, varied sources say three Howlands had immigrated early, but separately, to the Plymouth colony. John, Arthur and Henry were guessed to be brothers, perhaps all sons of Henry Howland of Fen Stanton, England. If not wealthy, young men could not pay their own way, but worked for passage, with John said, at MinerDescent.com, to be an assistant to the minister on the Mayflower. Elizabeth Pearson White, an Illinois genealogist who died in 2011 at age 90, wrote a book about him, with web sites quoting this part:
"John Howland of the Mayflower was called by Governor William Bradford 'a lusty younge man'. He was one of the hired hands among the Mayflower company, being neither a 'Saint', as the Pilgrims were called, nor a 'Stranger', engaged for a specific duty, as was the soldier, Captain Myles Standish."
Modern researchers Tom Howland and Raymond T. Wing learned that Howland is a place name, meaning land on a ridge. As a place name, it shows multiple male DNAs.
Seven or eight unrelated sets ("haplogroups") have been counted for Howlands teted thus far (by 2016, in Howland and Ring's name study at FamilyTreeDNAcom). The Plymouth ones were almost all of haplogroup "R-M269", with one close match also labeled as "RZ". Some of their matches did not leave England. One matching family somehow ended in Spain; another migrated from MA to Kentucky. The other haplogroups are not Plymouth/Fen Stanton matches, so neither R-M269 nor RZ. They have too few test-takers so far to draw conclusions.
FATHER'S. The Bates immigrated to places northward of Plymouth County. They were early of Weymouth, so closer to Boston, yet south of it. Other Bates thought to be unrelated were early to Boston proper.
SPOUSE ALEXANDER. Alexander's town before their marriage became Susan's town after marriage. His parents had married and baptized children in the south parish (Second Church) of Weymouth much earlier, before his parents took his older siblings to Maine. Born in Maine, he was of record as a military musician from Pittston, Maine, at a young age, in 1814. (Their young were recruited as the War of 1812 deepened.)
He returned to Weymouth decades later. This happened relatively quickly after his first wife's death back in Maine. His occupation as a mariner made trips easier than if he had been kept in one place by farming or a mill.
Was he anxious to find a mother for his Maine-born children? His mother was also deceased, not able to help him out with childcare. He soon married his second wife, Sarah Hovey Thayer, in Weymouth, in Sept. of 1839. Prior relationships may have produced that marriage, as his mother had also been a Thayer, and that Sarah's mother had been another Blanchard. If anyone worried about the children to come, it was moot, as they had none. At that marriage, he was still listed as from "Freeman, Maine", where his parents last lived. (Newly annexed by Franklin County in 1835, their township had been in Somerset County when his mother died and, before that, Kennebec and, earlier still, Lincoln County. His parents' last location, it was a township with changing bosses and thus with some records mis-placed by changes in courthouses. Their tiny hamlet was North Freeman. It had a sawmill and, for a time, a narrow gauge railroad used as an excursion train for enjoying scenery and making fishing trips. Its short line went to nearby Kingfield and a few other places inside Maine. Towns would depopulate after he left, for varied reasons.)
Second wife Sarah died quickly. Alexander married again, this Susan B. Bates, merely a year after his second marriage. By then, he was a resident of Weymouth in his own right. Again, did prior relationships matter in making their match? A prior Susannah Bates had been an ancestor to Alexander five generations back.
IN MAINE. Alex's parents moved to Maine before 1800, according to G. Chamberlain's old "History of Weymouth". Varied Maine histories indicate they followed some others to Pittston who had left Weymouth earlier. Alex was born in Pittston, verified by Chamberlain.
His family farmed newly-opened land in interior Maine, won previously from the British and French and native tribes, after many decades of warring. (Many to live on the emerging US side of Canada either received land directly or from their parents, under paperwork called "bounty warrants", or they bought from people who had inherited such warrants. The warrants were regarded as making-up for the heirs' fathers serving in the acquiring wars as soldiers, generally soldiering without pay or paid in worthless "scrip", unable to pay mortgages back home, often causing foreclosures. Unlike others not so rewarded, the "lucky ones" to receive land bounties had served under politically well-connected military leaders. The well-connected could arrange for the bounties for their soldiers and, at times, for entirely new daughter towns for their old Massachusetts communities. major portions of Maine had once been inside old Massachusetts. These things combined to cause many Maine towns to be named for Massachusetts towns.)
In Maine, the others arriving first to their part also farmed. Some ran mills, saw and grist, as side businesses. River traffic allowed boating/ferrying/barging as occupations. The Penobscot River was later to have steamboats making their way to Boston, via Bangor on the coast, before the eras of railroads and then semi-trucks on freeways handled more traffic. The big river's connection to the sea helps us understand Alexander as "mariner", the occupation listed on his death record.
IN MASSACHUSETTS. Alex's father was described by G. Chamberlain as Nicholas Blanchard the junior while living in Weymouth. (Nicholas was husband to Mary Thayer, son to Nicholas the senior and another, different Sarah Hovey.)
Junior's household was not present in Weymouth for its 1800 US Census, so they had moved before then. The census in 1790 listed his household in Weymouth, side-by-side with one headed by a Nicholas Blanchard the senior. Other Blanchards were on the same page, listed in "visitation" order, so perhaps living along the same road. (Surveys were a new idea, needing instruction. The forms were totally handwritten in 1790, not pre-published with blanks for the surveyor to fill in. Too many still could not read and write. The census-takers thus visited houses and took answers orally, moving down a road, house-to-house.)
Those households with young members seemed of the right age to be the junior's brothers. They also could have included cousins or young uncles.
Alex's parents left their last vital record in a Weymouth church in 1797. That was at Second Church, for the infant baptism of Alex's next older brother, Noah Blanchard. Like most of their siblings, Noah stayed in interior Maine. Their scenic lumber-milling area was made into new counties as their tiny hamlets grew in number, with the boundaries revised later, artificially splitting families apart. All siblings were at one point in old Somerset County. Then, some townships of Somerset were annexed by other counties. Most of their siblings thus died in Franklin County, in Kingfield if not in Freeman. Noah had not moved far, merely to Farmington and then to Lewiston, Maine, according to Chamberlain. However, his portion of old former Somerset County would be put into Androscoggin County. The county changes were in 1835, so after the death of Alexander's mother in 1829, but before the death of his first wife.
His old support system was thus "chopped up" both by politicians and by death. We assume relatives back in Weymouth became matchmakers, so his later marriages were in Weymouth.
The authorized attendance area for Second Church was the South Parish of Weymouth, made legal by an act of the colony's legislature in the early 1720s, needed earlier, authorized only to relieve population pressure at the First Church. Nicholas the senior's grandfather, one of the early John Blanchards, had moved from north to south inside old Weymouth, as part of the making of a daughter settlement. That was about 10 years before the Second Church was authorized. Too distant to easily attend the First Church, they would be "churchless" in the meantime. Some family records in the churchless years are thus found at neighboring Braintree, with a church closer-by. The Second would not receive any of Weymouth's town taxes until the 1760s. Despite having to cut corners, it managed to keep better books on its baptisms, with only four years said to be missing, said Chamberlain. (A former principal at Hunt School, he would have been well aware of which families' records were too scant. Due to Chamberlain covering more of them, more is known about the early Blanchards than about the Bates. The Bates were split between Weymouth and Pembroke. Chamberlain ignored Pembroke. )
Ahead of Chamberlain writing his history, both Pembroke and Weymouth made books for local "Vital Records through 1850". The 1850 cut-off date almost excluded Alexander's stone, and did exclude Susan's.
Town clerks and committees compiled the results, gathering up and organizing town and church records. There were "holes" to be filled. Careless pastors had taken records with them when they moved. For a temporary time, the intolerants among the adult baptizers had driven the infant baptizers out of First Church at Weymouth. There was the permanent problem of missing birth material for children of adult baptizers (with the tolerant ones allowed to stay after the infant-baptizing majority took their church back and the town kicked out the intolerant minority).
To fill the holes in births, they checked graveyards, finding stones then, that are missing now, 100 years later, and inferred birth year from age at death, if needed. This caused Alexander's stone to be listed under the Birth Records in Weymouth's book. That caused the mistaken idea that he had been born in Weymouth, not Maine.
They accepted family records. The Weymouth Bates were among ones to submit records to Weymouth. The Pembroke Bates were less well-covered, so Susan's grandparent Bates are uncertain.
(The Eddy Town Records Fund financed the two books' publishing by the New England Genealogical Society, with Pembroke's printed in 1911. The Weymouth area's historian, George Chamberlain, saw his book published in 1923, by the Weymouth Historical Society. )
===
THAYER IN-LAWS. Alex's mother, Mary Thayer, being female and leaving the area, was a poorly known individual inside a locally well-known family. Perhaps baptized as Maribah, perhaps a daughter of a Noah Thayer, neither of those things about her are certain, as dates or namings are "off a bit". Her Thayers, like his Blanchards, were also from Norfolk County.
With some in her ancestors' large families connected to ship-building, Mary's prior generations located a bit upstream of Weymouth. Theirs was the old town of Braintree, on the north side of the wide Weymouth River, beginning where Weymouth Landing ended. (Weymouth proper was on the south side of the salty/saline part of the big "fore" river. Weymouth's big harbor accessed the sea. Plymouth county wound around Weymouth and Norfolk's lower edge, trying to gain maximum access to the Atlantic Ocean.)
The places of the Bates and Blanchards and Thayers all started as rural "towns", more like townships with hamlets inside, one subsidized church per town/township. After the era of trappers and traders and workers mining bog iron, which included some "husbanding" animal herds in marsh pastures, their country places filled with regular small farmers and their mills and orchards. Inns and taverns sprung up around mills and churches, so farmers could wait for milling to finish and families could attend a faraway church for an infant's baptism or a relative's marriage or funeral. These were well-remembered events, considered "vital" to the ongoing life of the community, so written down.
Being a mariner or shipbuilder, or working as such in the off-season after summer farming, was also a choice. Blue collar work, such as quarrying in the Blue Hills and blacksmithing, let more permanently stop farming early. They slowly became more urban, with shoemaking a common "cottage industry" before the advent of factories. Their old factories mostly gone, these places are now all varied suburbs, south to southeast of Boston.
Family Members
Siblings
Children
Advertisement
Advertisement
