♀Marie Forget

Marie Forget (dates unknown) is known only as the mother named in her son’s marriage record in New France. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Jean Baptiste Renaud dit Deslauriers.

On 26 November 1705, at Sainte-Anne of Varennes, the register recorded the marriage of Jean Baptiste Renaud dit Deslauriers, written Jean Baptiste Arnault, to Anne Prévost, written Marie Anne Prevost. It names the groom as the son of Jean Arnault and Marie Forget, of a parish in the diocese of Limoges, in France. The parish name is hard to read on the page: it may be Asillac, the published index gives Assilat, and it has not been identified with any place known today. The register spells the family Arnault, in the text and again in the margin, while the son’s later records in the colony write him Renault, Renaud or Regnauld dit Deslauriers. That the two names belong to one man rests on a later record: the index of the 1730 marriage at Varennes of the couple’s first child, Charles, baptised at Boucherville in 1706 as Charles Renault Desloriers, names his parents as Jean Arnot Deslauriers and Marie Anne Prévot. Tanguay’s dictionary, in its introduction, gives Arnaud and Renaud as an example of a family name altered by a shifting r. Nothing more is known of Marie Forget’s life.