Today I’m spotlighting a very unusual family for their time: eight of eleven children survived to adulthood!

Estienne Leveillé and Anne Blanchon were married on 29 January 1674 in Saint-Bouize, Cher, France. Her father is a laborer and his father is a “vigneron” – someone who raises grapes for wine. ¹ Unsurprisingly, Estienne is doing the same as his father; he is also identified as a vigneron in later records.

Children of Estienne Leveillé and Anne Blanchon

Name	Birth	Death
Margueritte	1677	1690	Age 13 at death. She’ll be the subject of her own blog post soon.
Louis	1678	1726
Jeanne	1678	1720
Romblé	1683	1760
Anne	1685	1716
Marie	1687	1764
Marie	1689	1766	No, this is not a mistake. There were two daughters named Marie.
Pierre	1691	1694	Age 3 at death
Jean	1693	1731
Romblé	1695	1696	Age 1 at death
Françoise	1697	1770

So why did this family have more luck than most at keeping their kids alive? Maybe Estienne being a vignernon had something to do with it. Producing a beverage that everyone wants to buy helps you feed your children better. But we don’t know what his status was. The nobility owned the land, so Estienne likely didn’t own his own vineyard. Was he a lowly vineyard laborer or the supervisor of other workers?

The kids that did die young were not infants, so Anne must not have had much trouble with childbirth or breastfeeding. She lived many years after all of those births and years of child-rearing until about age 68, while Estienne died at age 59.

Sources for the children and their parents can be found here.

1. Archives Départmentales de Cher, Sancerre, 3E 1028, 1655-1674, 29 janvier 1674, Leveillé & Blanchon, images 1-2/307. ↩︎