♀Jeanne Hebert

Jeanne Hebert (1647 – before 25 March 1687) was an early colonist of Montréal, born in Paris, who married at Montréal at about thirteen with the sergeant-major of the Montréal garrison, Lambert Closse^W, as her legal guardian. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Catherine Milot dit Laval (1665–1708).

Early life

Jeanne was baptized in Paris in 1647, in the parish of Saint-Barthélemy, the daughter of Augustin Hébert, a tailor, and Adrienne Du Vivier. Her parents’ marriage contract, drawn up in Paris on 13 January 1646, names her father as the son of the late Jean Hébert, a merchant of Caen, and Isabeau Troussart, and her mother as the daughter of the late Antoine Du Vivier, a saddler of Corbeny in Picardy, and Catherine Journet. According to the Fichier Origine, the Québec register of immigrant origins, her father had first come to Canada as a soldier in 1637, was among the recruits for Montréal in 1642, and went back to France in 1645 to marry. He brought his wife and their infant daughter to Canada in 1647.

Marriage and family

Her father died in 1653, when she was about six, and her mother remarried Robert Cavelier the next year. On 7 March 1660, at Notre-Dame de Montréal, Jeanne married Jacques Milot dit Laval (1632–1699), whose French origin is not recorded. Two days earlier, on 5 March, the couple had a marriage contract drawn up before the Montréal notary Bénigne Basset^W; the contract is known from the published inventory of Basset’s acts, not from the minute itself. The register calls her the daughter “of the late Augustin Hébert”, and names as witnesses Dubois, a surgeon and a friend of her mother, and Closse, “tutor of the said” bride. A guardian was needed because her father was dead; the records do not say why the choice fell on the garrison’s senior officer.

The couple had ten children, who were baptized at Notre-Dame de Montréal between 1662 and 1682, among them Catherine Milot dit Laval (1665–1708), who married first Jacques Mongeau and, in 1698, Jean Joffrion at Varennes. The youngest, Marguerite, was baptized on 18 July 1682, with Antoine Forestier, a surgeon, and a Madame Cavelier as godparents by proxy; Cavelier was the surname of her mother’s second husband, Robert Cavelier. Two infants died at about a month old: Jean Baptiste Milot dit Laval, buried on 23 January 1671, and Élisabeth Milot dit Laval, buried on 21 September 1678. 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.

Death

She was buried in the cemetery at Montréal on 25 March 1687, aged about 40 and having received all the sacraments. No separate date of death is known.

Notes

An early published sketch called both her parents founding settlers of Montréal in 1642. Her father’s record supports part of that, since he was a 1642 recruit, but her mother came only after the Paris marriage of 1646, and Jeanne herself was born in Paris.

The burial register writes her husband as Nicolas Lavalle, most likely a slip for Jacques Milot dit Laval, whom the same register calls Jean at his own burial in 1699.