♀Nicole Lemaire

Nicole Lemaire was the wife of the joiner Gaspard Boucher, whom she married at Mamers, in the Maine, in 1619, and followed to New France in 1636 with their younger children; she was the mother of Pierre Boucher^W, later governor of Trois-Rivières. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Madeleine Boucher (1634–1691).

No record of her baptism, her parents or her death is among the records gathered for the family. The Fichier Origine, an index of the French origins of settlers in New France, names her parents as Nicolas Lemaire and Marie Gastrie, but the record behind that has not been examined; a family chart compiled in 1994 gives her birthplace as Mamers.

She married Gaspard Boucher on 12 December 1619 at Notre-Dame of Mamers. Eight of their children were baptised at Mortagne-au-Perche, Gaspard’s town, between 1620 and 1634, among them Pierre in 1622 and the youngest, Madeleine, in July 1634. Gaspard left for New France in 1634; Nicole followed in 1636 with the younger children, Madeleine then about two years old. Her niece Jeanne Dodier, a daughter of Françoise Lemaire of Mamers, came to the colony in 1663 as one of the filles du roi^W, and Yves Landry’s study of those women records that she had been preceded there by her aunt Nicole Lemaire, her uncle Gaspard Boucher and several cousins.

When Nicole died is not settled. The Fichier Origine repeats an account, credited to historians, that the family house at Trois-Rivières burned in 1663 with Gaspard and Nicole inside it; that account rests on tradition, not on a register. The 1994 family chart instead gives her death as 19 June 1652 at Trois-Rivières, which has not been checked against a register.