♀Renee Delaporte

Renee Delaporte (baptized 23 January 1642 – 6 May 1705) was a woman of the Île de Ré who emigrated to Québec in 1665 with her husband Jacques Arrivee and her widowed mother, was widowed and remarried in the colony, and died at Montréal. Her grandparents are said to have married at the Protestant temple of La Rochelle, so her family’s roots were Huguenot. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Louise Arrivee (1665–1744).

Île de Ré

Renee was baptized at St-Étienne d’Ars on the Île de Ré on 23 January 1642, the eldest of seven children of Jacques Delaporte and Esther Coindriau. Her father’s parents, Jehan Laporte and Judith Rodon, had married on 8 March 1615 at the Protestant temple of La Rochelle, then the stronghold of French Protestantism. By the time Renee and her brothers and sisters were baptized, the family worshipped in the Catholic parish of Ars. That mattered later: after 1627 only Catholics were allowed to settle in New France. Her father was buried at Ars on 3 September 1663, aged 48, six weeks after she married Jacques Arrivee in the parish church on 22 July 1663.

New France

In 1665 Renee and Jacques sailed for Québec, and her mother Esther, now a widow, came with her younger children; Esther married again at Québec the following March. Renee’s daughter Claude Louise was born at Québec on 7 August 1665. Renee appears in the censuses of 1666 and 1667, and had further children baptized at Québec in 1669 and 1671.

On 20 February 1673 she made a sale at Québec to Vincent Crotteau, and the notarial act calls her the wife of Jacques Arrivee dit Delisle. Jacques died between 1671 and 1673. On 29 January 1674, at Notre-Dame de Québec, Renee married Michel Berthelot, a man from Saumur living in the Lower Town, and had more children with him at Québec and later at Neuville, where the census of 1681 finds her. In July 1694 she and her husband, whom the notarial acts call Michel Duvaux, sieur Decormier, entered into an obligation before the notary Claude Maugue at Montréal. In April 1699 she leased out a house on the rue Saint-Vincent as the wife of Michel Devaux, before the notary Antoine Adhémar dit Saint-Martin.

She died at the Hôtel-Dieu of Montréal on 6 May 1705 and was buried the same day in the cemetery of Notre-Dame. The burial entry calls her Renee dite Descormiers.

Notes

Her surname is written Laporte, De Laporte, Delaporte and Desportes in the records. The Protestant marriage of her grandparents is reported by the Fichier Origine, a compiled source, and rests on that compilation alone.