♀Louise Arrivee

Louise Arrivee (7 August 1665 – buried 14 September 1744) was a woman of Montréal who married Jacques Cardinal at seventeen, raised at least eleven children, and died a widow, buried in the paupers’ cemetery of Montréal. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Jacques Cardinal (born 1685).

Life

Louise was born at Québec on 7 August 1665, in the year her parents, Jacques Arrivee and Renee Delaporte, arrived from the Île de Ré, and was baptised Claude Louise the same day; her godfather was Claude Le Barroys, the general agent of the company that then held New France, and her godmother Louise Juchereau. Her father died when she was about seven, and her mother remarried in 1674. She married Jacques Cardinal at Notre-Dame de Montréal on 23 November 1682, when the register gives her age as 17 and his as 30. Her children were baptised at Montréal from 1685 and at Lachine in 1702; one daughter, Catherine, died at the age of two in 1706. Her eldest known son, Jacques, settled at Detroit, and two of her daughters married men whose lives took them west to the Illinois country: Marie Louise, the wife of Nicolas Millet, and Marie Madeleine, whose husband, a native of the English colonies, became the royal notary there.

Death

She died a widow and was buried at Notre-Dame de Montréal on 14 September 1744, her residence given as Rivière-St-Pierre. The register adds that she was “enterrée dans le cimetière des pauvres”, buried in the cemetery of the poor, the ground set aside for those who could not pay for a place in the parish cemetery. The records do not say how she came to be buried there.

Notes

Her mother’s surname is written Desportes at her baptism and Delaporte at her marriage. The age of 82 at her burial is about three years high for a woman who was 17 in 1682.