♀Therese Mallet

Therese Mallet (12 April 1735 – buried 19 September 1763) was a French Canadian woman born at Détroit who married at the post of Vincennes, on the Wabash, and raised a young family there in the last years of French rule. She was fifteen when her marriage banns were published, and her husband was about forty-two. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Louis Renaud dit Deslauriers (born 1759).

Early life

She was born at Détroit on 12 April 1735, the daughter of Antoine Maillet and Therese Mailhot. Her father had himself been born at Détroit, and her parents had married at Montréal in 1730; their children were born, most of them at Détroit, between 1731 and 1743. Several died in infancy. An elder sister, also named Thérèse, born in 1731, was buried at Montréal in January 1734, and the name was given again to the next daughter, born the following year. Of her brothers, Louis, François and Antoine lived to adulthood and were later at Vincennes. Her father’s grandparents were Pierre Maillet and Marie-Anne Hardy, who had married at Montréal in 1662.

Marriage and family

By 1750 she and her mother were at Vincennes, then a French post in the Illinois country. On 26 October 1750 the banns of her marriage to Jean Baptist Renault Deslaurier, “of the parish of Varennes”, were published at St. Francis Xavier. The register names her as the daughter of Antoine Malette and Thérèse “Margotte”, a spelling of Mailhot, “of the parish of Villemarie”, that is, Montréal, and her mother was among those who signed. Her father was dead by 25 October 1753, when her mother, recorded as his widow, stood godmother to the couple’s first recorded child.

The register names seven children, baptized between 1753 and 1762: Marie Thérèse, Jean Baptiste, Marie Anne, Françoise, Louis, François and Charles. The commandant of the post, Mr. St. Ange, was godfather to Louis in 1759, and her brother Antoine and Marguerite Chapart stood for Charles in 1762. She was herself a godmother several times, signing with a mark; in February 1760 she and her brother Louis were godparents to Marie Louise, the daughter of Lizette, an Indigenous woman enslaved by St. Ange.

Death

She was buried at Vincennes on 19 September 1763, “after having administered the sacraments of the church”, at the age of twenty-eight. The burial came a year after the birth of her youngest child and a few months after the Treaty of Paris had ceded the region to Britain. Her granddaughter Ellenore later married Augustus Tougas, who also descended from Pierre Maillet and Marie-Anne Hardy.

Notes

The printed transcript of the burial leaves the husband’s name blank. The entry is taken to be hers, not her mother’s, because it calls the dead woman a wife, while the register always calls her mother a widow.

The birth date comes from Tanguay’s genealogical dictionary, which gives the Détroit baptism; a family chart compiled in 1994 gave 12 July 1733 at Montréal instead, but Tanguay lists no daughter born to the family that year. An index that places her 1735 baptism at Vincennes misreads the place.