♀Eustachine Gourdel

Eustachine Gourdel is an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) twice over: her twelfth great-grandmother by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Olivier Maillet.

Guillaume Mallet and Eustachine Gourdel are known only as the parents of Olivier Maillet, who is said to have been baptized on 14 April 1568 at Saint-Coulomb, a coastal parish near Saint-Malo in Brittany, and who raised a family there in the 1590s. Nothing else about Eustachine’s life is on record.

Lines of descent

Olivier Maillet married Michelle Jourdan, and their son Jean Maillet was baptized at Saint-Coulomb in 1590. Jean’s youngest son, Pierre Maillet (baptized 1629), crossed to Canada and married at Montréal in 1662. Pierre’s sons Rene Malet and Pierre Maillet began two lines that met again at Vincennes in 1801, when Augustus A. Tougas dit Laviolette (1776–1849), from the first line, married Ellenore S. Renaud dit Deslauriers (1782–1822), from the second. Their son Augustin Tougas Lovellette (1809–1866) descends from Guillaume Mallet and Eustachine Gourdel by both lines.

Notes

The parentage

Guillaume Mallet and Eustachine Gourdel are named in the Fichier Origine, the Québec federation’s register-checked file of immigrants, in its remarks on their great-grandson Pierre Maillet, baptized at Saint-Coulomb on 1 July 1629. It gives Pierre’s paternal grandparents as “Olivier Mallet (Guillaume et Eustachine Gourdel)”, baptized 14 April 1568 and buried 11 February 1608, and Michelle or Nicole Jourdan, married on 8 January 1589. No parish act naming Guillaume or Eustachine is known, so the parentage, Olivier’s baptism date and the couple’s link to Saint-Coulomb rest on that file alone. The file writes the family name Mallet, as the Saint-Coulomb register does in Olivier’s day; the line is entered here under Maillet from Olivier onward.