♀Marie-Madeleine Richard

Marie-Madeleine Richard (born about 1688) was a daughter of Guillaume Richard (1641–1690) and Agnes Tessier (born 1659), a family of Pointe-aux-Trembles on the eastern tip of Montreal Island. She was the eighth great-grand-aunt of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the sister of Jean Baptiste Richard dit Lafleur (1682–1731), Nancy Jane’s eighth great-grandfather.

Tanguay’s dictionary of Canadian families gives her baptism as 14 March 1688 at Pointe-aux-Trembles, Montréal, New France. She was one of at least ten children born to the couple between 1676 and 1690, and the same dictionary gives the burial of her brother Jean-Baptiste, born in 1680, on 23 February 1688, twenty days before her baptism. Her father, a former soldier of the Carignan-Salières regiment, had been the first commandant of Fort Frontenac and was later captain of the parish militia.

On 2 July 1690, when she was about two, he led a party of some twenty-five men near the Coulée Grou and was among the dead when an Iroquois war party overwhelmed them. Her mother sold part of the family’s property in 1692 and on 21 November 1692 married Claude Du Congé dit Lafortune, a soldier, at Pointe-aux-Trembles; more children followed from 1693. No marriage, children, death or burial is recorded for Marie-Madeleine.

Notes

Namesakes

Records of Acadia and Louisiana name other women Marie-Madeleine Richard, among them the wife of Jean-Baptiste Poirier, a daughter of Jean-Baptiste Richard and Marie-Catherine Cormier of Chignecto, who reached Louisiana in 1764. Nothing connects any of them to this Montréal family.