♂Jacques Archambault

Jacques Archambault (about 1605 – 1688) was a farmer and vine-grower from the hamlet of L’Ardillière in the parish of Dompierre-sur-Mer, near La Rochelle in the old province of Aunis, France, who settled in New France in the 1640s, became one of the early colonists of Ville-Marie, the settlement that grew into Montréal, and in 1658 dug the first well on the island of Montréal. He was the eleventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Marie Archambault (born 1636).

Early life and family in France

His birth is placed about 1605, in the hamlet of L’Ardillière, by a French origins index; Tanguay’s dictionary and an 1891 family genealogy give 1604, working back from the age of 84 recorded at his burial. The origins index names his parents as Antoine Archambault and Renée Ouvrard, and a second compiled work, Langlois’s, describes him as their son, of the parish of Dompierre in Aunis; no register act naming them has been found. The Dompierre register does show him among a group of Archambault households at L’Ardillière: the baptism of his first son, Denis, on 12 September 1630 is recorded as that of “Denis Archambault filz de Jacques Archambault et de Françoise Tourault”, with another Denis Archambault as godfather, and it places the family “du village de Lardillière de ladicte parroisse”. The register does not state how the godfather was related to Jacques. A Daniel Archambault lived in the same hamlet, and in December 1632 Jacques himself was godfather to the son of a Marie Ouvrard. That connection fits the Ouvrard name given for his mother but does not prove it.

He married Françoise Tourault about 1629. Her parents, according to the origins index, were François Tourault and Marthe Noire, of Saint-Amant-de-Boixe in the Angoumois. No record of the marriage is known: the Dompierre register that begins in 1629 appears to hold baptisms only. The parish register of Dompierre records the baptisms of their children, beginning with Denis on 12 September 1630 and including Marie on 24 February 1636 and Laurent on 10 January 1642. Seven children are known in all; a daughter, Louise, baptized in 1640, died in France. The marriage contract, believed to have been drawn up by a La Rochelle notary, is not known from any collection online, and no 1637 notarial act in his name is known.

New France

The family crossed to New France around 1645–1646 and lived at Québec until 1650. There, in 1647, his daughter Anne married Michel Chauvin, who was later found to have a wife living in France. Chauvin confessed before the governor, Maisonneuve, and fled back to France; the marriage was annulled, and in 1654 Anne married Jean Gervaise. On 28 September 1648 two of his daughters were married at Québec on the same day: Marie, then about twelve, to Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne, and her sister Jacquette to Paul Chalifour. Twelve was the youngest age at which the Church allowed a girl to marry, and the 1891 family genealogy remarks that two of Archambault’s daughters married at exactly that age; in a colony where men greatly outnumbered women, a settler’s daughters were sought as soon as they were eligible.

In 1650 Archambault moved to Ville-Marie. Between 1650 and 1652 he and his son-in-law Urbain Tessier received grants of thirty arpents beside the fort, on ground set aside for the future town. His eldest son, Denis, was killed there in 1651, in the years of repeated Iroquois attacks on the settlement, and was buried on 26 July 1651. The nineteenth-century historian Faillon records that the governor, Maisonneuve, assigned the defense of the settlement’s redoubts to men “known for their courage”, and gave the redoubt of the Enfant-Jésus, near the present Place d’Armes, to Tessier, Archambault and François Bailly. In October 1658 Maisonneuve had him dig a well in the middle of the fort’s parade ground, so that the garrison would have water in a siege; the contract, dated 8 October 1658, survives in the Ville-Marie notarial records. It was the first well dug on the island of Montréal. He went on to dig a second well in the garden of the hospital, which had been turned into a citadel, and in 1659 a shared well for the neighboring houses of Charles Le Moyne, Jacques Le Ber and Jacques Testard. In the militia of the Sainte-Famille, formed in 1663, two of his sons-in-law, his third son-in-law Gilles Lauzon and his son Laurent all served.

Later life

The historian Marcel Trudel’s reconstruction of the population of Montréal as it stood on 30 June 1663 lists him as a laborer from Aunis, about 59 years old, living with his wife, then about 63. Françoise Tourault was buried at Montréal on 9 December 1663. The origins index records a second marriage, to Marie Denault, by contract in 1666; this rests on the index alone. Jacques Archambault was buried at Montréal on 15 February 1688. The 1891 family genealogy records that he left 52 grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren, sixteen of the grandchildren through Marie and Urbain Tessier.