♂Jean Richard

Jean Richard (died before 1675) was a grain merchant of Saint-Léger, in the diocese of Saintes^W in Saintonge^W, France, and the father of Guillaume Richard, who went to New France as a soldier of the Carignan-Salières regiment^W and stayed there. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Guillaume Richard (1641–1690).

Almost everything known of him comes from one record: the marriage of his son Guillaume at Notre-Dame in Montreal on 26 November 1675. The register calls the groom the son of “feu Jean Richar vivant marchand de bled à St Léger diocèse de Xaintes en Saintonge” - the late Jean Richard, in his lifetime a grain merchant at Saint-Léger - and of “dame Meusnier” of the same parish. The word feu, “the late”, means he had died by the time of the wedding; no record of his death has been found. His birth and his parents are not known. His wife was Anne Meunier.

Guillaume was born about 1641. The parish register of Saint-Léger survives only from 1642, and a researcher for the Fichier Origine, an index of the French origins of settlers in New France, found no baptism for him there. She reported instead the baptism of a second son, Mathurin, on 20 August 1644, in which the father is named Jean Richard dit LeCadet. A dit name^W was a by-name added to a surname, and le cadet means “the younger”; the record does not say whom it distinguished him from. Whether other children followed is not known, because the register has a gap from September 1646 to August 1653. In Canada, Guillaume became the first commandant of Fort Frontenac, and he was killed by the Iroquois near Montreal in 1690.