♂Jacques Cardinal

Jacques Cardinal (baptised 23 July 1685) was a French Canadian of Montréal and Detroit who married the daughter of a Trois-Rivières surgeon in 1715 and raised his family in two places a long canoe journey apart, having children baptised at Detroit, then at Montréal, then at Detroit again, where by 1755 he was described as a burgher of the town. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Jean Baptiste Cardinal (born 1728).

Early life and marriage

Jacques was baptised at Notre-Dame de Montréal on 23 July 1685, the eldest known child of Jacques Cardinal and Louise Arrivee, who had married there in 1682. He grew up among a large family of sisters, two of whom married men who went west: his sister Marie Louise married Nicolas Millet in 1712 and later lived at Kaskaskia in the Illinois country, and his sister Marie Madeleine married Jean Baptiste Lootman, whom the register calls a native of “Côte d’Isope” in “Nouvelle-Angleterre”, most likely Esopus on the Hudson in the English colony of New York, and who became the royal notary of the Illinois under the name Barrois.

He married Jeanne Dugue at Notre-Dame de Montréal on 17 February 1715; the register gives his age as 28 and hers as 23, both single, and places her residence at Trois-Rivières. Her father, Jacques Dugue, is called a “maître chirurgien”, a master surgeon. In New France a master surgeon was a licensed practitioner, one of the few trained medical men in a colony that had very few physicians, so the bride came from a household of some standing. The witnesses included a royal notary, a merchant of the Trottier Desauniers family and his brother-in-law Nicolas Millet.

Montréal and Detroit

The couple had nine children between 1717 and 1735. The first was baptised at Montréal in 1717, the second at Detroit in 1719; four more followed at Montréal between 1720 and 1728, among them a Jean Baptiste who was buried at three months old in 1726, and a second Jean Baptiste, born in 1728, through whom the line descends. From 1729 every baptism is at Detroit, the post founded less than thirty years earlier, and the family appears to have settled there for good. The records do not say what took Jacques back and forth, but the pattern of baptisms shows the whole household moving with him rather than a man travelling alone.

The children married within the French communities of Detroit and the Wabash. His daughter Jeanne married Laurent Parent at Detroit in 1734, and a younger daughter Jeanne married Dominique Labrosse there in 1755. The same year his son Jean Baptiste married Marie Anne Mallet at Detroit, and the marriage register calls the father “bourgeois de cette ville”, a burgher of the town: a settled householder of standing rather than a transient trader or soldier. Two sons, Jean Baptiste and Nicolas Joseph, later moved to Post Vincennes on the Wabash, where Nicolas’s banns of 1761 name him as the son of Jacques Cardinal and “Marie Jeanne Duque”. Another son, Pierre, married at Detroit as late as 1778.

No record of Jacques’s death has been found.

Notes

The wife’s surname is written in several ways: Dugué at her marriage and at her son’s in 1755, Duquet at Vincennes in 1761, and Duguay in the modern index of Québec parish records. They are the same woman.

His age of 28 at his marriage was a year short: the baptism of 1685 is his, naming both parents.

A history of the Kaskaskia settlers names the notary’s wife as Madeleine Cardinal “baptized in 1690”; her Montréal baptism is dated 15 February 1699, and she was 17 at her marriage in 1717. The same history calls the notary the son of Antoine Jean Baptiste Barrois and Anne Leber, while the marriage register names his father Herbrand Lootman; the mother’s name is the same in both.