♂Antoine Maillet

Antoine Maillet (16 August 1706 – before 1753) was a French Canadian born at Détroit, five years after the French post there was founded, who married at Montréal and raised his family at Détroit before it moved on to the post of Vincennes, on the Wabash. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Therese Mallet (1735–1763). At his baptism at Fort Pontchartrain, on 16 August 1706, his godparents were Messire François de La Forest, esquire and captain of a company of the Marine detachment, and Dame Marie Thérèse Guyon, wife of Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac^W, commandant for the King at the fort. Godparents of that rank were unusual for the son of a merchant, and the register does not say why these two were chosen.

Early life

He was baptized at Détroit on 16 August 1706, the son of Pierre Maillet, a merchant, and Madeleine Dufresne, the widow of François Pelletier, who had married at Montréal on 9 January 1698. Détroit was then a young fort and trading post, established by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac in 1701. His younger brothers were baptized at Montréal: François in 1708, who died in 1716, and Jean-Baptiste in 1712, who married Marie-Anne Bienvenu-Delisle in 1741. His grandparents were Pierre Maillet, a settler from Saint-Coulomb in Brittany, and Marie-Anne Hardy, who had married at Montréal in 1662.

The surname was written in several ways: Maillet in Tanguay’s genealogical dictionary, which also gives Mallet, and Malette in the Vincennes register. His daughter’s line carried the form Mallet.

Marriage and family

On 11 August 1730, at Montréal, he married Therese Mailhot, born there in 1708, the daughter of Guillaume Maillot, an edge-tool maker and blacksmith. On 9 September 1733, at Montréal, he was about to leave for the pays d’en haut, the upper country, and he gave his wife a general power of attorney before the notary Jean-Baptiste Adhémar, the act recording him as living ordinarily in that town. They had at least ten children between 1731 and 1743, most of them born at Détroit. Six died young. The eldest, a daughter named Thérèse born in 1731, was buried at Montréal in January 1734, and the name was given again to the daughter born on 12 April 1735. Joseph, born in 1737, died in 1739; Marie-Catherine, Marie-Timothée, Angélique and Augustin each died within two weeks of birth. Four lived to adulthood: Thérèse, Jacques-Louis, Jean-François and Antoine.

Vincennes

By 1750 his wife and daughter were at Vincennes, then a French post in the Illinois country. On 26 October 1750 the banns of his daughter Therese’s marriage to Jean Baptist Renault Deslaurier were published at St. Francis Xavier; the register names her as the daughter of Antoine Malette and Thérèse “Margotte”, a spelling of Mailhot, “of the parish of Villemarie”, that is, Montréal. Her mother was among those who signed. The banns name him without any mention of death. By 25 October 1753 his wife, recorded there as his widow, stood godmother to their daughter’s child at Vincennes. He died between those two dates; the place of his death is not recorded.

His three surviving sons, Louis, François and Antoine, were later at Vincennes, where all three witnessed the banns of their nephew Jean Baptiste in 1779.

Lines of descent

Through his daughter’s line, his great-granddaughter Ellenore Renaud dit Deslauriers married Augustus Tougas at Vincennes in 1801. Augustus descended from Antoine’s uncle René Malet, so the couple were fourth cousins, both great-great-great-grandchildren of Pierre Maillet and Marie-Anne Hardy.

Notes

His baptism rests on the act in the register of Ste-Anne at Fort Pontchartrain (LAFRANCE act 14094986), which names his parents and godparents but omits his birth date, so 16 August 1706 is the day of baptism; Tanguay’s dictionary gives that date as his birth. His marriage and the births of his children rest on Tanguay’s dictionary, a nineteenth-century compilation from the registers, and the Drouin Institute index also gives the Montréal marriage of 1730. His marriage is given the same date in three separate entries of that work, under his own family, under his wife’s and under his wife’s mother’s.