♂Pierre Maillet

Pierre Maillet (baptized 16 February 1676 – 2 November 1738) was a French Canadian merchant of Montréal, a son of the Breton settler Pierre Maillet and Marie-Anne Hardy, whose son Antoine was born at Détroit in 1706, in the first years of the French post there. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Antoine Maillet (born 1706). Through him and his brother René, his parents are ancestors of Nancy Jane Blanchard twice over: their descendants met and married at Vincennes in 1801 as fourth cousins.

Early life

He was one of six children of Pierre Maillet, from Saint-Coulomb near Saint-Malo, and Marie-Anne Hardy, who had married at Notre-Dame de Montréal on 23 October 1662. The children were baptized at Montréal between 1663 and 1676, when the town was still a small fortified settlement. His elder brother René, baptized in 1668, stayed at Montréal as a habitant. The surname was written Maillet, Mallet and Malet, sometimes within the same family.

Marriage and family

On 9 January 1698, at Montréal, he married Madeleine Dufresne, born about 1673, the daughter of Félix Dufresne and the widow of François Pelletier. Tanguay records the marriage twice, under his family and under hers, with the same date and place, and describes him as a merchant (marchand).

The couple’s son Antoine was baptized at Détroit on 16 August 1706, five years after Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded the fort and trading post there. By 1708 the family was again at Montréal, where two more sons were baptized: François in 1708, who died in 1716, and Jean-Baptiste in 1712, who married Marie-Anne Bienvenu-Delisle at Détroit in 1741. The records do not say what took the family to Détroit or what trade he carried on there.

Antoine married at Montréal in 1730 and later raised his own family at Détroit; his daughter Thérèse’s line reached Vincennes, on the Wabash. There, in 1801, his great-great-granddaughter Ellenore Renaud dit Deslauriers married Augustus Tougas, a descendant of his brother René.

Death

Pierre died at Kaskaskia, French Territory, on 2 November 1738. By 6 August 1739 the royal court at Montreal had opened a curatorship for the minor children of the late Pierre Mallet, described as a voyageur, and of his wife, named there by her family’s surname as Madelaine Tune. The curatorship, to elect a guardian for the children, was requested by the merchant François-Marie Soumande Delorme, a creditor of the estate.

Notes

Tanguay’s first volume lists two sons of Pierre Maillet and Marie-Anne Hardy named Pierre, one baptized on 17 April 1670 and one on 16 February 1676, and places the 1698 marriage on the line of the elder. The registers say otherwise. The act of 17 April 1670 baptizes a son named Jean, although its margin reads “Pierre Mallet”, which is probably where Tanguay’s reading came from. The only Pierre baptized to the couple is the child of 16 February 1676, and the marriage act of 1698 gives the groom’s age as twenty-two, which fits that date. He is therefore taken to be the Pierre born in 1676.

His death

The death at Kaskaskia on 2 November 1738 is cited to the Kaskaskia Manuscripts digest of Lawrie Cena Dean (1981) and to the Montreal court notice of 6 August 1739 (BAnQ CC601,S1,SS1,D1114). The court notice names him as dead by that date, calling him “les feus Pierre Mallet voyageur”, and gives neither a date nor a place.