♀Marie Lecuyer

Marie Lecuyer (baptised 20 August 1671 – 19 August 1755) was a Montréal wife and mother of eleven children, whose brothers had sons of the Le Moyne family and the daughter of the merchant Jacques Le Ber as godparents, and who as a widow of forty-nine married a man of twenty-five. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Francois Mallet (1701–1757).

Early life

She was baptized at Montréal on 20 August 1671, the eldest of the twelve children of Pierre Lescuyer and Marie Juillet, who had married there the summer before. Her godfather was Jacques Le Ber, one of the leading merchants of the town. The same circle stood at the font for her younger brothers: in 1674 the godfather of her brother Pierre was Pierre Le Moyne, and in 1676 her brother Paul had Paul Le Moyne and Jeanne Le Ber as godparents. The register names the Le Moynes as sons of Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil, écuyer. Jeanne Le Ber, Jacques’s daughter, later became famous in the colony as a religious recluse. The records do not say how a family of modest standing came to have godparents of that rank.

Marriage and family

A marriage contract was drawn up at Montréal on 16 October 1689, and on 17 October 1689, aged eighteen, she married Rene Malet there. Their children were baptized there between 1691 and 1707: eleven in all, among them two sons who both went by Jean Baptiste. The younger, baptized Jean Marie in 1707, married under the name Jean Baptiste in 1731, with his elder brother Jean Baptiste as a witness. Martin died at eight days old in 1702. Marie Angélique married Charles Potier in 1716 and died two years later at twenty-one. Anne died unmarried in 1721, aged fifteen, when the family was living on the Côte de Verdun.

Rene Malet died before April 1717, when the register calls him deceased at his son Louis’s wedding. On 17 February 1721 Marie married Jean Baptiste Renault of Québec, son of Jean Baptiste Renault and Marie Hamel. The act gives the bridegroom as twenty-five and single. A marriage contract drawn up the same day before the notary Jacques David is said to describe her as living at the Sault-Saint-Louis, on the island of Montréal. By her baptism she was forty-nine, twice his age and the mother of grown children, several of them older than he was. The marriage lasted: Renault witnessed her sons’ weddings in 1725, 1731 and 1744, and the 1731 act calls him the bridegroom’s stepfather.

Later life and death

Her children spread out from the town. Gabriel married at Lachine in 1725; Francois was raising his family at Pointe-Claire by 1740; and a Jean Baptiste Mallet married at Detroit in 1741. Marie died at Montréal on 19 August 1755 and was buried the next day, still the wife of Jean Baptiste Renault.

Notes

The 1721 marriage act gives her age as thirty-eight, and her burial gives eighty-seven; her baptism of 1671 makes her forty-nine and eighty-three. The records do not show which of the two sons called Jean Baptiste married at Detroit in 1741.

The 1721 marriage contract

The contract is known only from the summary in Antoine Roy and Pierre-Georges Roy’s inventory of Montréal notarial records, which gives the notary and the residence. The contract’s own text is not known.