♂René Prévost

René Prévost (born about 1652) was a native of Paris who settled in New France, where he married Anne Daudelin at Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Anne Prévost. The marriage register, which writes his name Provost, gives his origin as the parish of Saint-Laurent in the archdiocese of Paris and names his parents as Nicolas Provost and Anne St-Amand. They married at Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade on 9 January 1684; the register gives René’s age as 32 and Anne’s as 16. Tanguay’s dictionary^W lists ten children of the couple, baptised between 1687 and 1706, the eldest at Batiscan; by its account three died in childhood. By 1705 the family was at Varennes, where their daughter Anne, written Marie Anne Prevost in the register and called of that parish, married Jean Baptiste Renaud dit Deslauriers on 26 November 1705, with René Prévost among the witnesses. The priest wrote the groom’s name as Arnault in the text and Arnaut in the margin; Tanguay’s dictionary gives the same marriage, to “Jean-Baptiste Arnault”, and the index entry for a 1730 marriage at Varennes, naming the groom’s parents as Jean Arnot Deslauriers and Marie Anne Prévot, ties the two surnames to one man. The date of René Prévost’s death is not known; the PRDH index of Québec parish registers names him as the husband in the entry for Anne Daudelin’s burial at Varennes in 1733, an act that has not been read.