♀Anne Girard

Anne Girard (10 February 1630 – 22 August 1710) was a Norman-born settler of New France, the wife of Nicolas Daudelin and the mother of Anne Daudelin, who was baptized at Château-Richer in 1667. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Anne Daudelin (born 1667).

Origins, marriage and death

According to the Fichier Origine, the register of emigrants from France to Québec, she came to the colony in 1665 as one of the filles du roi^W, the unmarried women whose passage the French crown paid between 1663 and 1673 so that the colony’s settlers could marry. The baptism register of Saint-Cyr-du-Vaudreuil, now Le Vaudreuil in the department of Eure, records her baptism on 10 February 1630, the same day as that of her twin brother, Gilles, and names their parents as Michel Girard, a master wheelwright, and Françoise de Graffard. Besides her twin, she had three brothers, the eldest Jean, then Claude and Jacques, and a sister, Catherine, who was buried in 1641. The Fichier Origine’s entry for her dates the rest of these baptisms at St-Cyr between 1623 and 1634.

The same entry records that her father had married a second time, to Marie Du Quesné, and that the marriage produced four children between 1641 and 1650. In November 1650 plague killed two members of the household within two days of each other: her stepmother, written in the register as Marie Girard, was buried on 2 November, and Jacques, fifteen years old, was buried on 4 November. Her father was buried at St-Cyr-du-Vaudreuil on 7 August 1661.

Nicolas Daudelin and Anne Girard married at Château-Richer on 22 October 1665, the date and place given both by the Fichier Origine and by Tanguay’s dictionary. Yves Landry’s study of the filles du roi adds that the marriage contract was drawn up the day before, on 21 October 1665, before the notary Aubert, and that neither she nor Nicolas could sign their names. By the date of her marriage she was thirty-five. Their daughter Anne was born and baptized at Château-Richer on 28 April 1667, entered in the register as Dodelain; she married René Prévost at Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade on 9 January 1684, and the marriage record names both her parents. Anne’s twin brother, René Daudelin, was born the same day and baptized with her. Tanguay’s dictionary lists other children of the couple besides Anne.

In the 1667 census the family on the Côte-de-Beaupré had ten head of cattle and forty arpents under cultivation. By 1681, in the Seigneurie de Beaupré, it had nineteen horned cattle and 37 arpents under cultivation.

The Fichier Origine records her death at Varennes on 22 August 1710; her daughter’s family was living in that parish by 1705.

Notes

Tanguay’s dictionary gives her birth as 1636 and her origin as Vaudreuil, in the diocese of Rouen; the baptism of 1630 recorded by the Fichier Origine is followed here; Landry’s study, which does not cite a baptism, puts her birth at about 1637. The censuses of 1667 and 1681 give her age as thirty and forty; the first fits a birth about 1637, and the second fits neither that year nor 1630.