♂Nicolas Prévost

Nicolas Prévost (died before 26 February 1639) was a merchant innkeeper at Saint-Denis, north of Paris. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Nicolas Provost. Nicolas Prévost and Madeleine Blondeau are known from a single record: the contract for their son’s marriage, drawn up before the Paris notary Denis Camuset on 26 February 1639 and given in abstract in a 2024 guide to the Paris notarial archives, Les familles pionnières de la Nouvelle-France dans les archives du Minutier central des notaires de Paris.

Their son, written Nicolas Prévost in the contract, was then a master surgeon (maître chirurgien) living at Saint-Denis. The contract names him as the son of “défunt Nicolas Prévost, vivant marchand hôtelier à Saint-Denis, et Madeleine Blondeau”: the late Nicolas Prévost, in his lifetime a merchant innkeeper there, and Madeleine Blondeau, whom it does not call late. The bride, Anne St-Amand, written Saint-Amant, was the daughter of a late wine merchant who had been one of the twenty-five privileged to follow the royal court, and she brought a dowry of 2,000 livres. The family appears in a guide to the pioneers of New France because of a grandson: René Prévost, born about 1652 in the Paris parish of Saint-Laurent, who married at Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade in New France on 9 January 1684. Nothing else is known of Nicolas Prévost or Madeleine Blondeau.