♂Guillaume Maillot

Guillaume Maillot (31 December 1680 – April 1718) was an edge-tool maker and blacksmith at Montréal, born at Grondines on the St. Lawrence between Québec and Trois-Rivières. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Therese Mailhot (1708–).

Early life

He was born at Grondines on 31 December 1680 and baptised there on New Year’s Day 1681, the son of René Maillot and Marie Chapacou. His mother had been born at Néré, in Saintonge, in 1658 and her parents, Simon Chapacou and Marie-Vincente Pacaud, reached New France in 1663; her father was described in two notarial acts as a mute man, one of the very few personal details that survive about him. By the time Guillaume married he was living at Saint-Louis-de-Lotbinière, across the river.

Marriage and family

On 16 January 1704, at the parish church of Notre-Dame in Montréal, he married Anne Macé (1684–1721), aged twenty, the daughter of Martin Macé, a master edge-tool maker, and Jeanne Ducorps. The register calls the groom’s father a habitant and records his mother’s name as Marie “Pacaud”. Among the witnesses was Gilles Luton, described as a former soldier of the Carignan regiment, and the vicar general, François Vachon de Belmont, also attended. A nineteenth-century genealogical dictionary gives Guillaume’s trade as edge-tool maker and blacksmith, the same trade as his father-in-law.

The couple lived in Montréal and had children from 1705. Several died as infants, among them their first son, Guillaume, in 1705. Their daughter Thérèse was born in 1708.

Death

He was buried at Montréal on 20 April 1718, aged thirty-seven. Five months later his widow married Pierre Courault, a young man from Angoulême, and her marriage record describes her as the widow of Guillaume Maillot.

Notes

The family name is written Maillot, Mailhot and Mailloux in the registers. His mother appears as Chapacou at his baptism and as “Marie Pacaud” at his marriage; Pacaud was in fact her own mother’s surname.