♀Marie Archambault

Marie Archambault (baptised 24 February 1636 – buried 16 August 1719) was a daughter of one of the first families of Montreal, born at Dompierre-sur-Mer near La Rochelle, who was married at Quebec at the age of twelve, on the same day as her elder sister, and who outlived her husband, the settler Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne, by thirty years. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Agnes Tessier (1659–1733).

Early life

She was baptized on 24 February 1636 in the parish church of Saint-Pierre at Dompierre-sur-Mer, in the old province of Aunis, France. The register names her as the daughter of Jacques Archambault and of his wife Françoise Tourault; the names of her godparents are not clear in the entry. Her father was a farmer and vine-grower of the hamlet of L’Ardillière, and she was one of seven children baptized at Dompierre. A younger sister, born about 1644, was also named Marie, and both lived to marry in New France. About 1646 the family crossed to New France and settled at Quebec.

Marriage

On 28 September 1648, at Notre-Dame de Québec, she married Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne, a long-sawyer from Anjou who had arrived that year in the service of the company that had founded Ville-Marie, the settlement that became Montreal. She was twelve years and seven months old. On the same day her sister Jacquette married Paul Chalifour, so that Jacques Archambault gave away two daughters at once. Twelve was the youngest age at which the Church allowed a girl to marry, and a family genealogy published in 1891 remarks that she and her younger sister Marie were each married at exactly that age. Such marriages were uncommon even in New France, where men far outnumbered women and a settler’s daughter could expect offers as soon as she was eligible.

Montreal

In 1650 the Archambaults and the young couple moved to Ville-Marie, then a small palisaded post, where her father and her husband took adjoining grants of land beside the fort. The settlement was under repeated Iroquois attack. On 6 May 1651 raiders burned the Tessiers’ house, and that year her eldest brother, Denis, was killed there; he was buried on 26 July 1651. Her husband held one of the town’s redoubts with her father, and in 1665 took further land at the Côte Saint-François, later Longue-Pointe. The census returns for 1666, 1667 and 1681 list her with her husband, giving her age as 30, 33 and 46.

The couple had at least thirteen children, born between 1649 and 1679, the first when she was thirteen and the last when she was forty-three; among them was Agnes, baptized at Montreal on 23 March 1659. The 1891 genealogy counts sixteen grandchildren through Marie and Urbain at her father’s death in 1688. She and her husband are both named in the record of the baptism of their grandson Jean Baptiste Richard dit Lafleur at Pointe-aux-Trembles on 19 March 1682.

Widowhood and death

Urbain Tessier was buried at Montreal on 21 March 1689. Marie lived on as his widow for thirty years. In August 1700 she leased a farm to her son Ignace Tessier before the notary Antoine Adhemar, and in November of that year she made a declaration as his widow to her sons Jacques, Jean-Baptiste, Ignace and Nicolas. She was buried at Pointe-aux-Trembles, at the eastern end of Montreal Island, where her daughter Agnes had lived since 1679. The index of French emigrants to Quebec records her burial there on 16 August 1719, in the parish of Saint-Enfant-Jésus, when she was eighty-three.

Notes

A family compilation of the twentieth century gives her death as 8 August 1685 at Montreal on one chart; the same compilation gives that date to her younger sister of the same name, and another page of the same compilation gives the burial correctly as 16 August 1719 at Pointe-aux-Trembles. The 1891 genealogy and a nineteenth-century genealogical dictionary give only her year of birth, 1636.