♂Jacques Cardinal

Jacques Cardinal (born about 1652) was a settler of Montréal who raised a household of at least eleven children there and at Lachine, and whose daughters married into the far reaches of New France, one of them to a man the register calls a native of New England. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Jacques Cardinal (born 1685).

Early life and marriage

Jacques was the son of Simon Cardinal and Michelle Garnier. The Montréal censuses of 1666 and 1667 list him as a boy of twelve and thirteen, so he was born about 1653 or 1654, barely a decade after Montréal was founded in 1642. On 23 November 1682 he married Louise Arrivee, aged 17, at Notre-Dame de Montréal; the register gives his age as 30. The grand vicar Dollier de Casson dispensed one of the banns, two priests of the Seminary gave the nuptial blessing, and two Cardinal kinsmen, Gabriel and Jean, stood as witnesses.

Family

The couple’s children were baptised at Montréal from 1685, with one daughter baptised at Lachine in 1702. Their eldest known son, Jacques, married in 1715 and took his own family to Detroit. Most of the children were daughters, and their marriages spread the family across the colony. Marie Louise married Nicolas Millet in 1712 and, as his widow, made a new marriage contract at Kaskaskia in the Illinois country in 1736. Marie Madeleine married Jean Baptiste Lootman in 1717; the register names him a native of “Côte d’Isope” in “Nouvelle-Angleterre”, most likely Esopus in the English colony of New York, and he later served as royal notary of the Illinois under the name Barrois: a history of the Kaskaskia settlers gives the notary Barrois the same mother, Anne Leber, and the same wife. Another daughter, Françoise, was still marrying, as a widow, at Châteauguay in 1751.

Death

A Jacques Cardinal was buried at Ste-Anne of Detroit on 18 May 1724, having died “yesterday at about three in the afternoon”. A nineteenth-century genealogical dictionary identifies him as Louise Arrivee’s husband, but the burial names no wife and gives his age as 84, some fourteen years more than the censuses allow. His widow is certainly recorded: she was buried at Montréal in 1744.