♀Hélène Guillet

Hélène Guillet (died before 4 September 1661) was a native of Chaumont-en-Vexin, in the Vexin north-west of Paris, and the wife of the shoemaker Jean Billard. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Perrine Billard (1635–1705).

She is known only from the marriage contract of her daughter Perrine, signed in Paris on 4 September 1661, as reported by two compiled works, the Fichier Origine, a register of French emigrants to Canada, and an article by Rémi Tougas. The contract calls Jean Billard and Hélène Guillet natives of Chaumont-en-Vexin and calls Perrine an orphan of both father and mother, so Hélène had died by September 1661. Perrine, still a minor, was represented by her aunt Marguerite Billard, and later settled at Montréal in New France with her husband, Nicolas Brazeau.

Notes

Some online family trees give her a baptism at Rennes, in Brittany, in 1617. That record belongs to another woman of the same name: the family came from Chaumont-en-Vexin, in another province some 300 kilometres away. No record of her own baptism, marriage or burial has been found. The family belonged to the parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Chaumont-en-Vexin, whose surviving registers break off in June 1609 and resume only in October 1653, so the years of her marriage and of her daughter’s birth are lost.