♂Michel Dugay

Michel Dugay (died before 1709) was a Frenchman known only through the two marriages of his son Jacques Dugue, a surgeon at Trois-Rivières in New France. The two marriage registers name different home towns for the family. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Jacques Dugue (born about 1647).

Family

Michel Dugay’s wife was Catherine Delobret. The registers also spell her surname “Loubert”, and a nineteenth-century genealogical dictionary gives it as “de Lebret”. Their son Jacques was born about 1647, a date worked out from his age of 80 at his burial in 1727. He crossed to New France and married twice at Trois-Rivières. When he married Jeanne Baudry on 21 November 1672, the register gave his origin as the parish of Notre-Dame at Semur-en-Auxois, in Burgundy and the diocese of Autun. When he married Anne Baillargeon, a widow, on 29 April 1709, the priest described him as the son of “feu Michel Dugay de Dolle”, the late Michel Dugay of Dole, and of Catherine Loubert, of the parish of Notre-Dame of Dole. By then Michel was dead.

The two towns are about 100 kilometres apart. They lay in different provinces: Dole was a town of the Franche-Comté, which was under Spanish Habsburg rule until France took it in the 1670s. The records do not explain the difference. The earlier register is the one written closer to Jacques’s own youth, and the later one is the only record that places Michel himself anywhere.

Notes

No baptism of Jacques has been found in the Semur-en-Auxois registers for 1646 and 1647, or in the Dole baptisms from January 1646 to March 1647. That window takes in every date his burial age allows. No marriage of Michel Dugay and Catherine Delobret appears in the Dole marriage register from December 1643 to November 1645. The Dole marriage registers that survive begin in December 1643, so an earlier wedding there could not be checked. Michel’s parents, and the dates of his birth and death, are not known.