♀Marie Breau

Marie Breau is named, with her husband Elie Garnier, as the mother of Michelle Garnier (about 1629–1720), a woman of Marans, near La Rochelle, who emigrated to Montréal in 1659; that parentage rests on a register of French emigrants to Québec, which marks it as uncertain. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Michelle Garnier. Her parents are not known, and no record of her birth, marriage or death has been found. The register, the Fichier Origine, names Elie Garnier and Marie Breau as Michelle’s parents but notes that the link is uncertain because no record of Michelle’s marriage survives. What the records do show is that Michelle had two sisters, Marie and Louise Garnier: a marriage contract of 1671 names Michelle’s husband, Simon Cardinal, and Louise’s husband, Pierre Goguet, as uncles of Marie’s daughter “because of” their wives. The couple do appear together in the parish register of Marans. On 9 March 1628 a daughter, Marie Garnier, was baptised there as the daughter of Elie Garnier and Marie Breau, with Nicollas Courtis and Marie Le Blancq as godparents. The Fichier Origine identifies her with the Marie Garnier who married Olivier Charbonneau and sailed to Montréal in 1659, the sister Marie of the 1671 contract, though it also notes another Marie Garnier baptised at Marans in 1625, a daughter of Jean Garnier and Marie Renaudeau. Family trees give her surname as either Breau or Brault, but they cite no records; the 1628 register writes Breau. The baptism registers of Marans for February to mid-August 1630 were searched without finding a child of Elie Garnier and Marie Breau, and a regional index of marriages in the Aunis has no marriage for the couple. The same 1630 register names a Denize de Breau as the mother of a child baptised at Marans on 17 August, which places a Breau family in the town that year; no link between her and Marie has been shown.