♂Jacques Arrivee

Jacques Arrivee (baptised 26 October 1639 – died before 17 August 1673), also called Delisle and sieur Descormiers, was a native of the Île de Ré, off La Rochelle, who brought his wife to Québec in 1665, where their daughter was born that summer with the general agent of the company that then held the colony as her godfather. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Louise Arrivee (1665–1744).

Île de Ré

Jacques was baptised at St-Étienne d’Ars, on the Île de Ré, on 26 October 1639, the son of Pierre Arrivee and Jeanne Rouzeau, who had married there in 1635. On 1 May 1663 he signed a marriage contract with Renee Delaporte, also of Ars, and they married in the parish church on 22 July 1663. He is styled “sieur Descormiers” in the records.

Québec

The couple sailed for New France in 1665, the year a regiment of soldiers and a wave of settlers were sent to the colony, and Renee’s widowed mother, Esther Coindriau, came too with her younger children. Their daughter Claude Louise was born at Québec on 7 August 1665 and baptised the same day at Notre-Dame. Her godfather was Claude Le Barroys, whom the register calls “agent général de la Compagnie des provinces et royaumes de l’Amérique”, the chief representative in the colony of the West India Company, as the company that held New France from 1664 to 1674 is usually called; her godmother was Louise Juchereau, of one of the leading families of Québec. The girl took both their first names. The records do not say how a newly arrived couple came by godparents of that rank.

The family appears in the censuses of 1666 and 1667, at Québec and Charlesbourg, and two more children were baptised at Québec in 1669 and 1671. Jacques died at Québec between October 1671 and August 1673, still in his early thirties. His widow married Michel Berthelot at Québec in January 1674.

Notes

The name is written Arrivé, Arive, Arrivée and Larrivée in the records, and Tanguay’s dictionary gives it with the by-name De L’Isle. His parents and baptism are taken from the Fichier Origine, a register of French emigrants to Québec compiled from the French parish registers; the baptism itself has not been seen here.