♀Renée Turcot

Renée Turcot (fl. 1646–1673) was the wife of Pierre You, a mason and stonecutter at La Rochelle, France, and the mother of Pierre You Sieur de la Découverte, who went to New France and became a companion of La Salle^W. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Pierre You Sieur de la Découverte (1658–1718).

Her birth date and age are not known. Her marriage contract with Pierre You was drawn up before the notary Apvrilleau on 11 November 1646, and the couple married at Sainte-Marguerite in La Rochelle on 15 January 1647. The family later lived in the parish of Saint-Sauveur, where her son Pierre was born in 1658 and where her two youngest children, Nicolas and Geneviève, were baptised on 25 December 1669 and 15 October 1673. Nicolas was baptised six weeks after the wedding of her daughter Anne in the same church. The couple had at least seven children; four daughters married at Saint-Sauveur between 1669 and 1684.

She was widowed when her husband was buried at Saint-Sauveur on 29 July 1675. When her son married at Montreal on 19 April 1697, the register named her as Marie Renée Turcot; it marked his father as deceased but made no such mark against her name. The date of her death is not known.

Her parents are not in the family record. A modern file of French emigrants to Canada, compiled from the La Rochelle registers, names them as Vincent Turcot, a master filassier, or dresser of hemp and flax, who was buried at Sainte-Marguerite on 28 July 1643 aged 50, and Renée Robert; the registers behind that statement have not been read.