♂Nicolas Brazeau

Nicolas Brazeau (about 1636 – between 1703 and 1705) was a Paris wheelwright, the son of a wheelwright of the parish of Saint-Paul, who emigrated to Montréal in New France in about 1681 with his wife and their three children, when he was in his mid-forties. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Marie Brazeau (1663–1735).

Early life and marriage

He was born in Paris in about 1636, the son of Nicolas Brazeau, a charron (wheelwright) living in the rue de la Cerisaie in the parish of Saint-Paul, and of Marie Regnard, who had died by 1661. His birth year is estimated from his marriage contract, which describes him as a minor, that is, under the age of twenty-five.

That contract, with Perrine Billard (1635–1705), was signed on 4 September 1661 before the Paris notary Laurent de Monhenault. A 2007 article in the journal of the Société généalogique canadienne-française gives an account of it, and the Fichier Origine, a register of French emigrants to Canada, records the same date and notary. No record of the church wedding itself has been found; most Paris parish registers of the period were lost when the city’s archives burned in 1871, which leaves notarial acts such as this contract as the surviving record.

Family and emigration

Like his father, he was a charron; the Fichier Origine gives that as his trade. According to the Fichier Origine, the couple had three children, all born in Paris: a daughter, Marie, in 1663, and two sons, Nicolas about 1670 and Charles in 1672.

By October 1679 the family was living at Amboise, in Touraine in the Loire valley. The parish register of Saint-Denis at Amboise records the marriage there, on 30 October 1679, of their daughter Marie, aged seventeen, to Silvain Guerin, aged twenty, the son of the late Silvain Guerin; the bride is named as the daughter of Nicolas Brazeau and Perrine Billard, and her father was present as a witness. The Fichier Origine gives Nicolas as engaged at Amboise as a wheelwright in June 1680, and within about a year the family crossed to Canada. The Fichier Origine records that the younger Nicolas came to Canada in 1681 “with his parents and his brothers and sisters”. The family settled at Montréal. When Marie married her second husband, the soldier Guillaume Tougas dit Laviolette, at Montréal on 10 November 1698, the register named her as the daughter of Nicolas Brazeau and Perrine Billard, of the parish of Saint-Paul in Paris, and two of her brothers, Charles among them, stood as witnesses. A family compilation adds that Charles worked as a wheelwright for Charles Le Moyne at Longueuil; that has not been confirmed against the records.

Both sons married at Montréal, Charles in October 1693 and Nicolas in October 1694. Both acts name the grooms’ parents as Nicolas Brazeau and Pierrette Billard, the form the register uses for Perrine, and the 1694 act calls father and son alike charrons.

Perrine Billard died at Montréal on 20 August 1705. A compiled register of French emigrants to Canada dates Nicolas Brazeau’s death between July 1703 and August 1705; no record of the death or burial itself has been found.

Notes

A family compilation gives his origin parish as Saint-Laurent in Paris and dates the marriage to 1662; the 1661 contract and his daughter’s 1698 marriage act both place the family in the parish of Saint-Paul. Online family trees give him a death at Montréal on 11 October 1694, or a death in 1705, without citing a record; the first is the date of his son Nicolas’s marriage at Montréal and the second the year of his wife’s death, and neither has been confirmed. One tree calls him Brazeau dit Boisdoré, a name not found in any record examined.