Melle Jeanne Mance. Fondatrice des Hospitalières de Montréal. Source: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, 52327/1956775.
Amateur historian Hugo Lavoie has identified the 17th-century home in Langres, Haute-Marne, France where one of the founders of Montreal, Jeanne Mance, was born in 1606.
Mr. Lavoie had meticulously gone through old official documents and found the inventory of the Mance estate produced after Jeanne Mance’s father Charles died. The inventory document led him to the discovery of the Mance house, its contents, and other information about the life of the Mance family. Charles Mance had been a prosecutor for the king in Langres and a bourgeois.
Mr. Lavoie’s detective work led him to a pretty home on rue Barbier d’Aucourt that was known as rue de L’homme sauvage when Jeanne Mance lived there. The stone house remains a private home and has changed little since the 17th century.
When Jeanne Mance founded Montreal in 1642 with Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, she was a French nurse. That same year, she established Montreal’s first hospital out of her home.
You can see the Mance house with a blue door at 11 rue Barbier d’Aucourt on Google Maps. To read a news report, in French, about the discovery of the house on which this blog post is based, visit Radio-Canada’s website.
