♂Denis Archambault

Denis Archambault (born about 1630, baptized 12 September 1630 – July 1651) was the eldest son of a vine-growing family of Dompierre-sur-Mer in Aunis, France, and a young settler of Ville-Marie, the settlement that grew into Montréal. He was the tenth great-grand-uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the brother of Marie Archambault (born 1636), her tenth great-grandmother.

Dompierre and the crossing

Denis was baptized at Dompierre-sur-Mer on 12 September 1630, the son of Jacques Archambault (born 1605) and Françoise Tourault (born 1600), who lived in the hamlet of L’Ardillière in the parish. The register names his godfather as another Denis Archambault of the same hamlet; it does not say how the two were related. He was the first of the seven children the couple had baptized there. About 1645–1646, when he was fifteen, the family crossed to New France and settled at Québec. In 1650 they moved to Ville-Marie, where his father and his brother-in-law Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne took land beside the fort.

Ville-Marie, July 1651

According to Faillon, Denis was about twenty when the Iroquois besieged the hospital at Ville-Marie. Faillon records that the garrison fought from six in the morning until six in the evening and lost only Denis, who was lighting an iron cannon for the third time when a fragment of the gun burst and killed him on the spot; the burst gun also killed many of the attackers. Faillon calls him brave.

Marcel Trudel’s roster of Montréal gives his burial on 26 July 1651. No marriage is recorded for him, and Nancy Jane Blanchard descends through his sister Marie, not through him.

Notes

Another Denis Archambault

A laborer named Denys Archambault of L’Ardillière married Jeanne Le Breton at Dompierre on 18 July 1632, and the register records children of that couple baptized in 1640, 1643 and 1650. He married in 1632, when this Denis was a child of two, so he cannot be the boy; the register does not say how he was related to Jacques Archambault.