♀Anne Prévost

Anne Prévost (died before 1718) was the first wife of Jean Baptiste Renaud dit Deslauriers, and the mother of the children baptised to the couple at Boucherville and Varennes, in New France, between 1706 and 1715. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Jean Baptist Renault Deslaurier (born 1708).

She was the daughter of René Prévost and Anne Daudelin, of Varennes. No baptism has been found for her, and Tanguay’s dictionary gives her birth without a date. She married at Varennes on 26 November 1705; the register names the bride as Marie Anne Prevost, daughter of René Prevost and Anne Daudelin, of that parish, and writes the groom as Jean Baptiste Arnault, never as Renaud. That he is the man later known as Renaud dit Deslauriers rests on two further entries: the index of the 1730 marriage of her son Charles, at Varennes, names his parents as Jean “Arnot Deslauriers” and Marie Anne Prevot, and Tanguay’s dictionary, under her father, lists a Marie-Anne married on 26 November 1705 to Jean-Baptiste Arnault. The register of Boucherville names her Anne Prévost at the baptism of her son Jean Baptiste, born and baptised there on 1 October 1708; an elder son, Charles, had been baptised there in 1706. By 1710 the family was at Varennes, where further children were baptised in 1710, 1711, 1712 and 1715. She died before 29 May 1718, when her husband, of Sainte-Anne-de-Varennes, married Marie Anne Pinault of Verchères at Contrecoeur and was entered in the register as the widower of Marie Anne Prévots. The second marriage brought another son named Jean Baptiste, baptised at Varennes in 1728, while her own son of that name was still living. Her name outlasted her by more than thirty years: when her son married at Vincennes in 1750, the index of that marriage names his mother as Marie Anne Presot, and it is that entry which shows the Vincennes man to be her son rather than his younger half-brother.