♂René Mauget

René Mauget (died before June 1627) was a man of the parish of Sainte-Croix in Angers, in Anjou^W, where he and his wife Espérance Georget raised a family at the turn of the seventeenth century and where, in October 1602, four of their sons were buried within a single month. He is an ancestor of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) twice over: her eleventh great-grandfather by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Renée Moget (baptized 1601).

Life

René and Espérance brought six children to the font at Sainte-Croix between 1589 and 1601: Ysabeau, Jacques, Pierre, Guillaume, Jehanne and, last, Renée, baptized on 19 November 1601. A seventh, a son named François, appears only in the parish’s burial register.

The autumn of 1602 emptied the household of its boys. Guillaume, not yet five, was buried on 4 October and Pierre on the 5th; Jacques followed on the 24th and François on the 29th. The register names each as a son of René Mauget, and the first three as sons of Espérance Georget as well; it does not say what killed them. Thirteen months later, on 24 November 1603, Espérance herself was buried at Sainte-Croix.

René outlived her, but not by enough to see his daughter Renée settled. When she contracted to marry René Hardy, a master goldsmith of the parish of La Trinité, before the notary Fronteau at Angers on 6 June 1627, the contract named her as the “fille de deffunct René Mauget” - the daughter of the late René Mauget.

Lines of descent

Renée and René Hardy’s daughter Marie-Anne Hardy was baptized at La Trinité in 1633 and married Pierre Maillet at Montréal on 23 October 1662. Two of her sons carry lines that reach the family, and the lines meet again in Augustin Tougas Lovellette (1809–1866), whose parents Augustus A. Tougas dit Laviolette (1776–1849) and Ellenore S. Renaud dit Deslauriers (1782–1822) both descended from René Mauget and Espérance Georget.

Notes

Names in the registers

The clerks of Sainte-Croix spelled the family name as they heard it: Mauget at Ysabeau’s baptism in 1589 (where she is “Elizabeth alias Ysabeau”), Moget at Guillaume’s in 1598 and Maugy at Renée’s in 1601. Espérance appears as “Georgette” in 1589 and as Georget at her burial. The 1627 marriage contract writes Mauget.

The dates

No baptism or marriage of René or Espérance is known at Sainte-Croix, so his birth and the date of the marriage are unknown. The burial entry of November 1603 calls Espérance “en son vivant femme et espouse de René Mauget” (in her lifetime the wife of René Mauget), not his widow, so he was still alive then; the contract of 1627 is the first record of him as dead. The baptisms of Jacques (1591), Pierre (1595) and Jehanne (1599) rest on the archive’s index of the register; those of Ysabeau, Guillaume and Renée, and the five burials, are given from the register entries themselves.