♀Anne Meunier

Anne Meunier (fl. 1644–1675) was the wife of Jean Richard, a grain merchant of Saint-Léger, in the diocese of Saintes^W in Saintonge^W, France, and the mother of Guillaume Richard, who went to New France as a soldier of the Carignan-Salières regiment^W and stayed there. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Guillaume Richard (1641–1690).

She appears in the marriage of her son Guillaume at Notre-Dame in Montreal on 26 November 1675, where the register names his parents as “feu Jean Richar vivant marchand de bled à St Léger diocèse de Xaintes en Saintonge et dame Meusnier mesme paroisse” - the late Jean Richard, in his lifetime a grain merchant at Saint-Léger, and “dame Meusnier” of the same parish. The act gives her surname only. It calls her husband “the late” Jean Richard but uses no such word for her; it does not say whether she was then living. Her given name comes from Tanguay’s genealogical dictionary of 1871, which calls her Anne Meusnier, and from the Fichier Origine, an index of the French origins of settlers in New France. Her birth, her death and her parents are not known.

Guillaume was born about 1641. The parish register of Saint-Léger survives only from 1642, and a researcher for the Fichier Origine found no baptism for him there. She reported instead the baptism of a second son, Mathurin, on 20 August 1644, naming his parents as Jean Richard dit LeCadet and Anne Meunier. Whether other children followed is not known, because the register has a gap from September 1646 to August 1653. In Canada, Guillaume became the first commandant of Fort Frontenac, and he was killed by the Iroquois near Montreal in 1690.