I have not been able to identify the parents of Marie-Madeleine Archambault, who was probably born around 1725 and married François Darcy, becoming the grandmother of the Marie-Agathe Darcy who married Jean-Baptiste Roy dit Chouigny.

All the Canadian Archambaults are descended from Jacques Archambault (1604-1688, son of Antoine [1575-1654] and Renée Ouvrard) and his wife Françoise Tourault, who lived in the village of Ardillière, near the small Gascon port of Dompierre-sur-Mer, now a suburb of La Rochelle. They were married in 1629 and crossed the Atlantic with seven children in 1646, as part of a company of settlers raised by Pierre Legardeur de Repentigny, director of the new Compagnie des Habitants. They settled at Montréal. Soon Jacques owned a farm outside the town, with a house, cows and pigs; but he owed Repentigny a large sum of money for the property. He continued to acquire land up and down the river during his long life, including urban property in Montréal; he also developed a reputation as a dowser, and was much sought after by farmers needing new wells. After his wife died in 1663, he married Marie Denot dit Lamartinière, already three times a widow.

Children: Anne (1621-1699, married Jean Gervaise after annulment of a marriage with Michel Chauvin, who turned out to be a bigamist; nine children with Gervaise); Denis (1630-1651); Jacquette (1632-1700, married Paul Chalifou, 14 children); Marie (1636-1719, married Urbain Tessier, Sieur de Lavigne, 16 children); Louise (1640, died young?); Marie (1642-1685, married Gilles Lauson or Lauzon); and Laurent (1642-1730, below). Denis was killed during a battle against Iroquois attackers at Ville-Marie, when a cannon he was firing exploded.

As Laurent was the only male child of Jacques and Françoise to have children, he is very likely our ancestor. He married (1660, age 18) Catherine, daughter of Pierre Marchand and Geneviève Lespine; she was a "fille du roi" from Paris and an orphan. They were among the first settlers at Pointe-aux-Trembles, where Laurent was one of two men given responsibility for building the church. (It is call L'Enfant Jésus; the present building is pictured above.) Their children: Laurent (1661, died young?); Catherine (1663); Marie-Geneviève (1666), another Laurent (1668, married Anne Courtemanche); Jacques (1671-1725, married Françoise Aubuchon); Anne (1674, married Nicolas Deroche); André (1676, married Cécile Adhémar); Pierre (1678, married Marie Lacombe); Françoise (1681-1717, married Toussaint Baudry); Jean-Baptiste (1683, married Cécile Lefèbvre); Marie-Madeleine (1685, married Gilles Galipeau); and Marie (1686-1687).

Laurent, Jacques, André, Pierre and Jean-Baptiste all had sons, and Archambault grandchildren in the 1720s; almost certainly one of these five was our Marie-Madeleine's grandfather. But their offspring are fairly well documented, and the only Marie-Madeleine I can find among them is a daughter of Pierre's son Jean; but she died an infant in 1744, too young anyway to be our ancestor. In addition, there was: a Madeleine, born 1735, daughter of Laurent (1709-1767) and Marguerite Brouillet; son of Jean (1683-1731) and Cecile Lefebvre; son of the Laurent Archambault and Catherine Marchand mentioned above; and a Madeleine-Agathe, born 1736, daughter of Jacques (b 1699) and Marguerite Loiseau; son of Jacques (1671-1725) and Françoise Aubuchon (her mother was a Sédilot); son of the same Laurent and Catherine mentioned above.

Was one of these the wife of François Dercy? I think Madeleine-Agathe is the more likely candidate, as she is related in various ways to other ancestors of ours (Aubuchon, Sédilot, Roy) and we know how close cousins tended to marry; also they lived in the same area as the Roy dit Chouigny family. Also, note that Barnabé had a a daughter named Agathe - named for his mother? However, Madeleine-Agathe was born in 1736; though we do not know the birth year of her possible son Barnabé Dercy or Darcy, we do know that he was a father by 1769 or 1770. (His wife was certainly born in 1747, and he was her second husband - it was unusual for a husband to be younger than his wife, but he would have had to be, if this Madeleine-Agathe was his mother. In fact he would almost necessarily have been a teenager when they married.) Is it possible that Madeleine-Agathe was a grandmother at 33? Certainly possible, but not very likely.

There are other sons of these five brothers for whose children I have not found records. Some would have been too young to be Marie-Madeleine's father. Pierre Archambault's Dictionnaire des Archambault d'Amérique (researched in the 1990s) is very complete and well-documented, and shows no other Madeleines who might have been François Dercy's wife - indeed, it records no marriages at all between an Archambault and a Darcy in the eighteenth century. The Dictionnaire does not list a spouse or death date for either of these women; so the author didn't know whom they married (it's also possible they died young and didn't marry anyone, though the book usually does list death dates for children who died). Of course, the author of the Dictionnaire could have missed another Madeleine altogether; or maybe our ancestor wasn't really named Madeleine; or she came from another Archambault family altogether. These three possibilities seem pretty unlikely. None of the genealogical dictionaries lists any other Archambault family in Québec.

One other possibility: researcher Joanne Darcy says that Barnabé could have been born in France, in which case his Archambault mother would not have been one of the Canadian family at all. However, that contradicts the opinion of some researchers that the Dercy or Darcy family originated in Ireland. Also, Barnabé's supposed birthplace, Ste-Anne de Madry, cannot be found anywhere in France. There is a lake of that name in Québec near Chicoutimi, but no town, and no Ste-Anne. There is, however, a French-Canadian 'Madry' family, to which we are not realted, as far as I can tell.

There are various marriages among Archambaults and other Darcy ancestral families, as mentioned; and a Demers leased land from Jacques Archambault.