♀Agnes Tessier

Agnes Tessier (baptised 23 March 1659 – buried 24 January 1733) was a daughter of early Montreal, whose godmother at her baptism was the wife of Monsieur d’Ailleboust, of the family of a former governor of New France. She was widowed in 1690 when her first husband, a militia captain, was killed by the Iroquois. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Jean Baptiste Richard dit Lafleur (1682–1731).

Early life

She was baptized at Notre-Dame de Montréal on 23 March 1659, the daughter of Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne, a sawyer from Anjou who was among the first settlers of the town, and of Marie Archambault. The register names her godmother as the wife of Monsieur d’Ailleboust. The entry just above hers, from December 1658, names Barbe de Boulogne, wife of Louis d’Ailleboust, “formerly lieutenant general for the King in New France”, in other words a former governor of the colony, and she was very likely the same godmother. A settler’s child with a godparent of that rank was unusual. The register does not say how the families were connected. Montreal was then a small palisaded post under constant threat of attack. Agnes was one of at least thirteen children born to her parents between 1649 and 1679.

Marriage and family

On 26 November 1675, at sixteen, she married Guillaume Richard, Sieur de La Fleur, at Notre-Dame de Montréal. He was a former soldier of the Carignan-Salières regiment, then a sergeant of the Montreal garrison, from Saint-Léger in Saintonge. The witnesses were almost all her own family: her uncle Laurent Archambault, her uncles by marriage Jean Gervaise and Gilles Lauzon, and her brothers Paul and Laurent and her sister Louise. She signed the register as “Agnesse Tessier”; the groom declared that he could not sign. A nineteenth-century genealogical dictionary gives the wedding as 20 November, but the register itself reads the twenty-sixth.

From 1679 the couple lived at Pointe-aux-Trembles, on the eastern tip of Montreal Island, where her husband worked as a blacksmith and later commanded the parish militia. They had at least ten children, born between 1676 and 1690. Their first son named Jean-Baptiste, born in 1680, died in 1688; a second Jean-Baptiste, born in 1682, later went west as an interpreter at the post of Ouiatenon. On 2 July 1690 Guillaume Richard led a party of about twenty-five men near the Coulée Grou, at the east end of the island; they were overwhelmed by an Iroquois war party, and he was among the dead. He was buried hastily where he fell, and his remains were moved to the parish cemetery in 1694.

Widowhood and second marriage

As his widow she sold part of their property in May 1692. On 21 November 1692, at Pointe-aux-Trembles, she married Claude Du Congé dit Lafortune, a soldier in the company of Monsieur de Varennes, and more children followed from 1693. An online family tree gives his burial as 3 September 1729 at Montreal; that date rests on the online account alone.

Death

She was buried in the cemetery of Pointe-aux-Trembles on 24 January 1733. The register calls her “Agnès Texier dite Lavigne, widow of the late Ducongé”, aged about seventy-five. She was in fact seventy-three. The date of her death itself is not recorded.