♂Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne

Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne (baptised 10 February 1626 – buried 21 March 1689) was a sawyer from Anjou who became one of the first settlers of Montreal, ran through four Iroquois ambushes under sixty to eighty musket shots without being hit, and held one of the town’s defensive redoubts. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Agnes Tessier (1659–1733).

Early life

He was baptised on 10 February 1626 at Notre-Dame of Breil, in Anjou, the son of Arthur Tessier (“Arthus” in the priest’s spelling), a carpenter, and of Jeanne Mesme. Later family accounts gave his birth as 24 February 1624, but the baptism register settles the date. His mother was buried at Château-la-Vallière, in neighbouring Touraine, on 13 March 1648, and he sailed for New France the same year, arriving as a long-sawyer (a man who cut timber into planks with a two-man pit saw) in the service of the Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal, the company that had founded Ville-Marie six years earlier.

Marriage

On 28 September 1648, within months of his arrival, he married Marie Archambault at Quebec. She was the daughter of Jacques Archambault, a settler from Dompierre-sur-Mer near La Rochelle, and she was twelve years old. That was the minimum age at which the Church allowed a girl to marry; a family history of 1891 remarks on it as a curiosity, noting that two of Archambault’s daughters married at exactly that age. Such early marriages were not common even in New France, where men far outnumbered women and a colonist’s daughter could expect offers from the moment she was eligible. The couple had at least thirteen children between 1649 and 1679, and at Jacques Archambault’s death sixteen of his fifty-two grandchildren were Urbain and Marie’s.

Montreal

Between 1650 and 1652 he and his father-in-law were among the first colonists to take land grants beside the fort, on ground reserved for the future town. Montreal was then a small, palisaded post under constant Iroquois attack. On 6 May 1651 raiders burned his house. Six weeks later, on Sunday 18 June 1651, a large war party fell on four Frenchmen between the fort and Pointe-Saint-Charles as they came out of mass; Tessier ran to their aid, passed through four ambushes, and was fired on sixty to eighty times without being wounded, an episode the historian Faillon recorded as an act of daring. When Governor Maisonneuve organised the militia of the Holy Family in 1663 he served in its eighth squad, and Maisonneuve gave the redoubt of the Enfant-Jésus, at one end of Tessier’s land near the present Place d’Armes, to him, his father-in-law and François Bailly, men chosen for their courage. In 1665 he took a further grant at the Côte Saint-François, later Longue-Pointe.

Death

He was buried at Montreal on 21 March 1689, aged about 63.