♀Michelle Garnier

Michelle Garnier (born about 1629 – 23 May 1720) was a woman of Marans, near La Rochelle, who came to Montréal in 1659 with her husband Simon Cardinal and two of her sisters’ families, buried three of her children in France and one in the colony, and lived to about ninety at Lachine. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Jacques Cardinal (born about 1652).

Marans

Michelle was born about 1629 at Marans, a small port on the marshes north of La Rochelle, and married Simon Cardinal there about 1652. The Fichier Origine, a register of French emigrants to Québec, names her parents as Elie Garnier and Marie Breau, but marks that parentage as uncertain, because no marriage record for Michelle or her sisters survives. What is certain is that Marie, Michelle and Louise Garnier were sisters: the marriage contract of Marie’s daughter in 1671 names Simon Cardinal and Pierre Goguet as the bride’s uncles “because of” their wives Michelle and Louise Garnier.

Of the five children Michelle had at Marans, three died young there, between 1652 and 1658.

Montréal and Lachine

In June 1659 the three sisters and their husbands were engaged at La Rochelle for Montréal, Marie and her husband for the Hôtel-Dieu, the town’s hospital, and all three households crossed that year. Michelle had four more children baptised at Montréal between 1661 and 1670; the youngest, Cécile, died as an infant.

Simon died at Lachine in August 1679. On 23 April 1680, at the church of the Saints-Anges at Lachine, Michelle married Jean Chevallier, with her sons Jacques and Jean Cardinal among the witnesses. The register notes that “a dispensation for the forbidden time” was granted: the Church did not normally celebrate weddings in Lent or in Easter week, and that year Easter fell on 21 April, so the couple needed a dispensation to marry two days after it.

She died at Lachine on 23 May 1720, at about ninety.