♂Francois Mallet

Francois Mallet (18 June 1701 – buried 1 May 1757) was a habitant of Montréal and later of Pointe-Claire, on the west of the island, whose daughter married at Detroit in 1755. Two of his small children were buried on the same day, 2 April 1733. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Marie Anne Mallet.

Early life

He was born on 18 June 1701 and baptised Jean François at Montréal the next day, a son of Rene Malet and Marie Lecuyer, who had married there in 1689. He was one of eleven children. His father died before April 1717, and in 1721 his mother married again, to Jean Baptiste Renault of Québec.

Marriages and family

On 8 November 1728, aged 26, he married Marie Roy, 21, at Notre-Dame de Montréal. Among the witnesses were his brothers Louis and Jean Baptiste. The couple’s first children were baptised at Montréal: Jean Baptiste Amable in 1729, Marie Josèphe in 1730 and Joseph in 1732, when the family was living on the Côte de Verdun, just upriver from the town. Marie Josèphe, aged two, and Joseph, seven months old, were buried together on 2 April 1733; the register does not give a cause. Another Marie Josèphe was born in 1734 and Marie Madeleine in 1736.

By 1740 the family had moved out to Pointe-Claire, where two more children were baptised in 1740 and 1742; both died in infancy. Marie Roy was buried there on 9 March 1744. Six months later, on 9 September 1744, Francois married Marie Charlotte Brunet, daughter of Michel Brunet dit Letang, at Pointe-Claire, and children of the second marriage were baptised there in 1745, 1746 and 1750.

The family’s ties reached Detroit: a brother, Jean Baptiste, married there in 1741, and Francois’s daughter Marie Anne, whose baptism has not been found, was living at Detroit when she married Jean Baptiste Cardinal there in April 1755.

Death

He was buried at Pointe-Claire on 1 May 1757, aged 57 by the register.

Notes

The index of his 1744 marriage and of his burial calls him “single”, although both name his parents and he had married in 1728; it is an error in the index, and no other son of that name was baptised to his parents.