Who Was Blanche Eugenia Draper (Hanchett)?

When I was about thirteen years old, my mother--Lois Adelaide Hanchett Harper--told me that when she was my age she was shocked to learn that her father, George Draper Hanchett, had been married for the first time, not to her mother (Georgia Elizabeth Thompson Hanchett), but to his first cousin, Blanche Eugenia Draper.

"It wasn't that it was a big secret or anything like that," Mom told me. "Everyone knew." By everyone, my mother meant all four of her siblings (Ruth, Margery, George, and Dana), all of them much older than she. As Mom put it, "No one had ever thought to tell me."  

George Draper Hanchett, a dairy farmer, married Blanche in August 1906, when he was 23 years old, and she two months shy of her 27th birthday. By December of that year, Blanche was very ill with tuberculosis, which most seriously affected her heart. She died 23 April 1907, a little over eight months after she and George wed. Her death certificate states that her doctor, Charles Hills, had been treating her since 19 December 1906 for "chronic endocarditis," an inflammatory infection of the valves of the heart, a relatively common complication of tuberculosis. Blanche had worked as a "trained nurse," according to the 1900 U.S. Census. Perhaps she contracted the illness from her time working as a nurse.

As I mentioned, Blanche Draper was George Hanchett's first cousin. George Hanchett's mother, Ida Betsey Draper, was one of six children born to James Dallas Draper and Mary Olive Bullard Draper. Ida Betsey and her siblings grew up in South Natick on Pegan Hill, very close to the Dover boundary with Natick. All vital records for members of this family are attached to Natick, Massachusetts.

Blanche was the only child of Ida Betsey's older brother James Abbott Draper, a dentist, who married Mary Eugenia Morrill in 1878. Unfortunately for Blanche, when she was three years old, her father left the family to settle in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada. He eventually remarried, 9 Jun 1891, his second wife Mrs. Margaret Wilson Barker (Maggie Ann), of St. John, New Brunswick. 

In ensuing U.S. Censuses, Blanche's mother consistently reported that she was a widow. I have not searched court records for evidence of a divorce (these are not online) to determine whether James and Mary divorced, but based on my knowledge of this historical era and the stigma attached to divorce, it is probable that James's removal to Canada made a divorce strategically unnecessary, thus sparing Mary the social humiliation.

James Abbott Draper has a ground-inlaid stone at Glenwood Cemetery on Glen Street in South Natick in the Draper plot. The actual simple stone reads “Abbott.” But he was buried in 1910 in St. John, New Brunswick, according to Canadian records, three years after his daughter Blanche's death. He clearly remained in touch with his Draper siblings, and the organization of the Draper Plot at Glenwood Cemetery, I believe, is the love and work of Susan Gertrude Draper, known affectionately to family as "Aunt Sue," James Abbott's older sister.