♂Jacques Milot dit Laval

Jacques Milot dit Laval (1632 – 15 August 1699) was an early colonist of Montréal, New France, who came from the Maine country of France, from the parish his 1660 marriage contract calls Cheuigny. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Catherine Milot dit Laval (1665–1708).

Early life

Tanguay’s nineteenth-century compilation^W gives Milot dit Laval’s birth as 1632, with no place, and the marriage act names his parents as Gabriel Milot and Julienne Phelippot. No parish or province of origin for him appears in the Montréal marriage register, and he is not among the entries in the Fichier Origine, the database compiling the documented French origins of Canada’s early immigrants. His marriage contract of 5 March 1660 gives his origin as the parish of Cheuigny in the Maine country; the parish word is uncertain, and later writers identify it with Chevaigné-du-Maine in Mayenne. Some family compilations circulating online give an Auvergne birthplace for him, but that claim rests on an unsourced family tree and is not supported by any register or index.

Marriage and family

On 7 March 1660, at Notre-Dame de Montréal, Milot dit Laval married Jeanne Hebert (1647–1687), daughter of the late Augustin Hébert and of Adrienne Du Vivier. Two days earlier, on 5 March, the couple had a marriage contract drawn up before the Montréal notary Bénigne Basset^W, as was usual in New France; the original minute survives in the notary’s file at BAnQ. Its opening clause names the groom as the son of the late Gabriel Milot and of Julienne Phelippot, and names the parish of Cheuigny in Maine, though the parish word is uncertain. The marriage act calls both “of this parish”. Because Jeanne’s father was already dead, her legal guardian at the wedding was Lambert Closse^W, the sergeant-major of the Montréal garrison. The Montréal censuses of 1666, 1667 and 1681 list the couple as a household with their children, though the ages printed against them do not agree from one census to the next.

Tanguay’s compilation lists ten children, born between 1662 and 1682, among them Catherine Milot dit Laval (1665–1708), who married first Jacques Mongeau and, in 1698, Jean Joffrion dit Saint-Jean at Varennes. A notarial act of 2 February 1684, in the name of Jacques Millot dit Laval, records a concession contract, the usual form of land grant in New France.

Death

Milot dit Laval died in the hospital of Montréal, the Hôtel-Dieu^W, on 15 August 1699 and was buried the next day. The Notre-Dame parish register enters the burial and gives his age as eighty, which does not fit a birth in 1632. It calls him “Jean” rather than Jacques, apparently a slip of the priest’s pen, since the entry still carries his usual by-name “dit Laval”; the same register had called him “Nicolas” at her burial twelve years earlier.

Notes

Tanguay’s nineteenth-century compilation of the Quebec parish registers gives a burial of 4 November 1699 for a “Jean Milot,” which was once taken to be Jacques’s burial date. That entry in fact belongs to a different man, Jean Milot dit Le Bourguignon, and does not describe him; his death and burial are the 15 and 16 August 1699 dates given above.

A shared, user-built online family tree places Gabriel Milot and Julienne Phelippot’s marriage at about 1635 in Laval, in Maine, France, which would account for the by-name “dit Laval” that Jacques and his descendants carried. No record states it: the 1660 contract gives Cheuigny in the Maine, not Laval, and the Fichier Origine, the Québec immigrant-origin database, has no entry for him, so it stands only as a claim that no record confirms, one that happens to fit the by-name.