♂Jean Baptiste Renaud dit Deslauriers

Jean Baptiste Renaud dit Deslauriers (fl. 1706–1728) 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).

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. That Arnault and Renaud are one man rests on a later record: the index of the 1730 marriage at Varennes of his son Charles, baptised at Boucherville in 1706 as Renault Desloriers, 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^W, 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 baptised at Boucherville in 1706 and a son Jean Baptiste born and baptised there on 1 October 1708. By 1710 the family was at Varennes, where further children were baptised in 1710, 1711, 1712 and 1715. 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 before 1718. On 29 May of that year, at Contrecoeur, he married Marie Anne Pinot (also written Pinault) 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 baptised Jean Baptiste at Varennes on 23 July 1728, twenty years after the first. 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. No record of the father’s death has been found.

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. 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 death date has not been checked against a record.