♂Jean Baptiste Renaud dit Deslauriers

Jean Baptiste Renaud dit Deslauriers (c. 1669 – 1750) was a settler of Boucherville and Varennes, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence near Montréal, in New France, who had two sons named Jean Baptiste, one by each of his two wives. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Jean Baptist Renault Deslaurier (born 1708).

Marriage and family

On 26 November 1705, at Varennes, the register recorded his marriage to Anne Prévost, written Marie Anne Prevost, and wrote him “Jean Baptiste Arnault”, son of Jean Arnault and Marie Forget, of a parish in the diocese of Limoges, in France. The parish name is hard to read and has not been identified with any place known today. The marriage contract of 24 November 1705, passed before the notary Jacques Bourdon, names him Jean Arnault dit Deslauriers, son of Jean Arnault and Marie Forget, of the diocese of Limoges; it is the earliest record to join the names Arnault and Deslauriers. The identification with Renaud also rests on the index of the 1730 marriage at Varennes of his son Charles, baptized at Boucherville in 1706 as Renault Desloriers, which calls him Charles Arnot Deslauriers and names his parents as Jean Arnot Deslauriers and Marie Anne Prévot. Tanguay’s dictionary lists the 1705 marriage of Marie-Anne, daughter of René Prévost, to Jean-Baptiste Arnault, and in its introduction gives Arnaud and Renaud as an example of a family name altered by a shifting r. “Deslauriers” is a dit name, a second surname (“called Deslauriers”) carried alongside Renaud, and the registers write him several ways: Renault Desloriers, Renaud Deslauriers, Regnauld. With his first wife, Anne Prévost, he had a son Charles baptized at Boucherville in 1706 and a son Jean Baptiste born and baptized there on 1 October 1708. By 1710 the family was at Varennes, where further children were baptized in 1710, 1711, 1712 and 1715. On 27 June 1715 he, then described as of Saint-Michel, acknowledged a debt of 100 livres to René Prévost, whom the act calls his father-in-law. Two sons of this marriage later married as men of Varennes: Louis at Boucherville on 28 January 1732, and Pierre on 27 November 1741. Anne died suddenly at Varennes on 17 November 1716, aged about thirty-one, and was buried the next day, 18 November. On 26 May 1718 the contract for his second marriage was drawn up before Jacques Bourdon, with Marie Pinault, daughter of the late Michel Pinault and Simone Baudet of Cap-Santé. Three days later, on 29 May, at Contrecoeur, he married Marie Anne Pinault (also written Pinot) of Verchères, and the register calls him “of Ste-Anne-de-Varennes, widower of Marie Anne Prévots”. Children of the second marriage followed from 1719, among them a son baptized Jean Baptiste at Varennes on 23 July 1728, twenty years after the first. Nearly nineteen years after his first wife’s death, a closing of the inventory of the joint property of him and the late Marie Anne Prévost was registered at Montréal on 8 July 1735, according to a catalogue of the Montréal court’s inventory records. The two half-brothers are easily confused. The elder’s marriage at Vincennes in 1750 names his mother as Marie Anne Prévost, which shows that the Jean Baptiste who went west was the son of the first marriage. He was buried at Varennes on 26 March 1750, aged 81, still the husband of his second wife, Marie Anne Pinault.

Notes

A family chart compiled in 1994 gives his birthplace as Astaillac in the Limousin, France, and his first wife’s death as 17 November 1716 at Varennes, which the burial entry bears out. The chart’s marriage date of 26 November 1705 agrees with the register, which reads his parish as “Asillac” (the published index gives “Assilat”); that reading supersedes the chart’s Astaillac. The contract of 26 May 1718 names his mother as Marie Truteau, not Marie Forget; the two 1705 records agree on Forget.