♂François Quintal

François Quintal (born 6 June 1682) was a man of Boucherville, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence opposite Montréal, the son of an immigrant from La Rochelle, and the father of at least thirteen children born there between 1713 and 1732. In May 1757, at about seventy-four, he was present at the second marriage of his widowed daughter Marie-Anne. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Marie-Anne Quintal (1720–1792).

Early life

He was born at Boucherville on 6 June 1682 and baptised the same day, the son of François Quintal (1644–1715) and Marie Gautier. His father had been baptised at La Rochelle in January 1644, the son of Michel Quintard, a carter and later a tavern-keeper, and Marie Genin; he came to New France in 1662, married Marie Gautier at Québec on 17 October 1678, when he was already living at Boucherville, and was buried there in February 1715, aged seventy. His marriage record gives his parish as Saint-Sauveur in La Rochelle; the register of Sainte-Marguerite holds his baptism.

No record states in so many words that the François Quintal who later married Marie Guertin is the child baptised in 1682. He is the only François Quintal baptised before 1700 in the Québec parish registers, and a birth in 1682 fits a marriage about 1712.

Marriage and family

He married Marie Guertin, born in 1696, around 1712; no record of the marriage has been found. Their first child, Agathe, was born at Boucherville in August 1713, and the couple had at least thirteen children between then and 1732; every baptism found is in the parish of Sainte-Famille at Boucherville. Three died in infancy: a first daughter named Marie-Anne, born in December 1718 and buried the following August at eight months old; a child baptised in an emergency and buried in March 1723; and a son Joseph, buried in September 1726 at three months. The name Marie-Anne was given again to a daughter born on 13 July 1720, through whom the family line runs. A son, Antoine, was buried unmarried in July 1747, aged thirty-two.

Several of the children married: Agathe at Nicolet in 1732, the younger François at Longueuil in 1740, Charlotte Angélique in 1749, Augustin in 1751, and Véronique, to André Marcille of Longueuil, in 1752. Marie-Anne married Guillaume Tougas dit Laviolette, a widower of Longueuil, at Boucherville on 25 November 1739; the register names her parents as François Quintal and Marie “Quentin”.

Guillaume Tougas was buried at Boucherville in December 1756. When Marie-Anne married again, to François Chicot, a widower, at Boucherville on 2 May 1757, the register records that her father, François Quintal, was present. He was then about seventy-four.

Death

No record of his death or burial has been found. Marie Guertin was buried at Boucherville on 3 May 1766, aged seventy-two; the register calls her married, and names her husband as François Quintal, rather than calling her a widow. If the register is exact on that point, he was still living in 1766, at about eighty-three.

Notes

The parentage of Marie Guertin is not settled. Louis Guertin and Madeleine Chicoine baptised daughters named Marie in 1694 and 1696 (the elder was buried in 1695), and the godmother of Marie-Anne in 1720 was a Marie Anne Guertin of that family, but no record names Marie Guertin’s parents. A daughter recorded only as “Marie” Quintal married Marc Antoine Vignau, a surgeon from Bagnères in the diocese of Tarbes, in 1754; which of the daughters she was is not stated in the records read.