From orphan to patriarch E-Book

Edward Roby

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 387

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This book researches the origins of an enduring cluster of interrelated North American families first formed in colonial New France in the 17th Century. The narrative tracks the genealogy and history of the families Roberge, Boisvert and Boucher, all prominently found in the author's 11-generation family tree. The investigation delivers circumstantial evidence of mixed ethnogenesis in the formative years of what is now the Canadian province of Quebec. The founding patriarchs most prominently introduced in these pages appear to have been orphans of uncertain origin.

Leseprobe

To the indispensable research of the late ethnohistorian Dick Garneau

Edward Roby

From orphan to patriarch

Men without a past who founded dynasties of New France

© 2020 Edward Roby

Verlag und Druck: tredition GmbH, Halenreie 40-44, 22359 Hamburg

ISBN

E-Book: 978-3-347-21039-4

ISBN (Print formats published 2019)

Paperback: 978-3-7482-4509-4

Hardcover: 978-3-7482-4510-0

Cover image: Village church of St. Germain le Vasson, Normandy, 2018 Source: Edward Roby

All rights reserved.

Das Werk, einschließlich seiner Teile, ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages und des Autors unzulässig. Dies gilt insbesondere für die elektronische oder sonstige Vervielfältigung, Übersetzung, Verbreitung und öffentliche Zugänglichmachung.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Three men from Normandy

Ile d'Orléans and Wendat refugees

Chapter 2

Farmers, fishermen, family founders

Evangelist mystics from l'Ermitage de Caen

The vicar's man for all seasons

Quebec-born wives

Chapter 3

A gentleman of Champagne among the Algonquins

Trouble in Champagne: Brantigny, de Nevers and Henri IV

Conclusion

Chapter 4

The first Boisvert – French or Maliseet?

Chapter 5

Voyageurs' base camp on the Rivière du Loup

Trading with the natives

Voyageurs put down new roots

Chapter 6

Yamachiche draws settlers from the East

Blais family of Ile d’Orléans

Grenier and Blais in Mauricie

Carbonneau and Martin from Ile d'Orléans and Chateau Richer

Clans of Millette and Pelletier

Native Americans from France?

Rousseau, Dubé, Soucy, Boucher from Rivière Quelle

Chapter 7

Gélinas and Benoit from Cap de la Madeleine

Chapter 8

Bears – forebears – Boisverts

Bishop Cooke, “the Indians' friend”

Chapter 9

The name of the father – a knight's primal secret

A DNA riddle

Chapter 10

The mistress of Pointe-du-Lac and her godfather

Born under a lucky star

Timeline 1653-1732 – Pointe-du-Lac / Tonnancour

Chapter 11

The mistress of Pointe-du-Lac (continued)

Annex A

History and genealogy of ancient Bayeux

Annex B

Roberge lineage

Annex C

Boisvert family tree

Annex D

Descent of Marcelline Boisvert

Annex E

Trois-Rivières' bishop with Acadien roots

References

Introduction

The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past — William Faulkner

About forty years ago I packed the car and took my young family of four on a camping trip all around the great Northeast. Some basic outdoor gear and a Sears tent afforded us the cheapest of back-roads escapes from the summer doldrums of central Virginia. The economical vacation in cooler climes turned into a memorable family adventure.

Historic Quebec being last on our casual travel itinerary, we followed the advice of a budget-friendly tourist brochure which recommended a neat public campsite on a big island just outside that fortress city. This island was called Ile d'Orléans. I'd never heard of it. Even the name soon faded to a vague recollection – until one day in early January of 2018.

That's when an ironic coincidence dawned on me: We had pitched our tent on the same St. Lawrence River island where my earliest known male ancestor had made his home three and a half centuries ago. Thanks to a decade of sleuthing, I had just solved the mystery of who the paternal forebears were and where they came from. Eureka!

Various cousins, even with help from a professional researcher, had long been stymied in that cul-de-sac of genealogy. It looked like trail’s end because our great-grandfather, Frank Roby, né François Roberge, left behind not so much as a single photograph of himself, let alone any surviving clue to his birthplace or family in Quebec.

So our mutual ancestry quest had yielded a chronicle skewed toward the better known clan of Frank's second wife, Marcelline Boisvert, the mother of his four sons, all raised near Trois Rivières. That research became our 2012 manuscript, New Light on an old Family of Yamachiche: How Boisvert and Roberge became Roby. But it still wasn't possible to reconnect the inscrutable Frank Roby to his severed French Canadian roots. His parents remained unknown.

As luck would have it, the crucial link fell into place when a cousin on the Boisvert side discovered a couple of archived Glens Falls, N.Y., newspaper items dating back more than a century. One reported on Frank’s 1903 funeral, naming three surviving brothers who came in from Burlington, Vermont. The other was a brief 1891 social note on a visit paid to Frank by his long-lost older brother who had been roaming the West and Southwest for 43 years.

The given names and approximate ages of those five Roberge brothers proved a perfect match to only one of perhaps a hundred Roberge families of that era in Quebec. Bingo! It was now possible to trace our unbroken line of descent directly back to Pierre Roberge dit Lapierre of Ile d'Orléans in the 1660s.

This bridge to the past called for a revised family story. Direct paternal ancestors can now be named and even profiled within their own social setting of parishes, marital affiliations, relatives and interactions with historic contemporaries. What we've newly learned of the first Roberge family follows in the initial chapters. And since our 17th-century Canadian patriarch is said to have come from the ancient diocese of Bayeux in Normandy, an historical annex features that strategic corner of northwest France.

Perhaps the biggest surprise between these covers awaits in chapters three and four. A long-forgotten baptismal act from 1663 caused us to re-examine the oft contested origin of greatgrandmother Marcelline Boisvert’s family. That surviving artifact came to our attention only after the 2012 family book was in print. But it seems to upend the complacent presumption that the first Boisvert was a natural son of a French colonial couple who once homesteaded on the Algonquin reservation created by the Jesuits at Sillery. The Boisvert roots begin to look even redder than we had supposed.

The exploits of nomadic Boisvert frontiersmen and their blood ties to other fur-trading families in Indian country were chronicled in 2012. Chapters five through eight of this sequel now look more closely at other men and women found in the ancestral tree of our métisse great-grandmother. She was, after all, an eighth-generation descendant of Champlain companion Marin Boucher, who arrived in Quebec during the first quarter of the 17th Century. The last three chapters deal with the extended Boucher family.

While working these new wrinkles into a revised family story, a recurring thread emerged that is rarely mentioned in literature on the colonization of New France: Apart from reassuring Gallic surnames, the parents of the flesh-and-blood patriarchs who founded the 17th Century settler families are often as elusive as ghosts. The supposedly French elders of the first Roberge, for example, now qualify for the blanket euphemism “origin unknown”. And several other men without a past are also found deep in the family tree.

All old families of Quebec trace their roots back to fewer than five thousand early émigrés whose own ancestors may be as enigmatic as our own. Given the shared gene pool, our investigation might even find broader interest in the diaspora of families first formed in the St. Lawrence parishes. For instance, our Marcelline’s line of descent sows doubt that her male ancestors were really as French as their surnames.

My grandfather, a mechanical engineer who had no time for such frivolities as genealogy, put it bluntly: All the families where I came from were of mixed blood. He and his three brothers were raised in rural Pointe du Lac and schooled in Cap de la Madeleine the last decades of the 19th Century, before their parents decided to head south.

Academic genealogy ignores such staples of family lore. In today’s Quebec, if you're not on a reservation, you must be French. It’s the only Canadian province where the mixed First Nation called Métis goes officially unrecognized. A scholarly hierarchy defends the ethnic homogeneity of the colonial progenitor society. But the peerless personal freedom flaunted by egalitarian aboriginal bands held nearmagnetic attraction for early French adventurers. The voyageurs whose surnames now speckle the continental interior attest to that.

Yet the birthplace of those frontiersmen has now acquired an ethnocentric European world-view. “One speaks of neither the presence of foreigners nor of slaves in the French colony,” wrote author Pierre Montour. “And this discourse belittles the role of interethnic marriage by insisting upon the numerical insignificance of this phenomenon.” The purity fetish even inspired a quip from a Trois-Rivières humorist: Les Québécois sont des Métis qui s'ignorent.

The overriding reason, opined historian Sylvie Savoie, is the fear of being tarred with the neo-Darwinian stigma of racial inferiority that supposedly set Amerindians on their path to extinction. Passionate avowals of racial purity initially mirrored the insecurity of a vanquished French Canadian minority, as Canada’s inconvenient aboriginals got in the way of a steamroller of 19th Century land-grabs on the western plains.

Prevailing orthodoxy renders nearly unfathomable the reality that must have overshadowed the daily life of an early French settler. The 17th Century great power threatening his existence was the mighty Iroquois Confederation right next-door. In this deadly duel, stitching up tight alliances with the friendlier native nations was the ticket to survival. This French strategy was plainly behind the mixed-race future envisaged by Quebec founder Samuel de Champlain in his famous parley with a chieftain, whose friendship he courted. And his enlightened vision was initially endorsed by both the clergy and the crown.

The first Quebec census in 1666 pegged the French population at 3,215, two out of three being men. Our first Roberge patriarch entered the records in just this time-frame. The headcount doubled by 1672 because the crown dispatched a contingent of women called filles du Roi and a regiment of soldiers to fight off the Iroquois. But that was the end of serious immigration.

In both the Roberge and Boisvert lineage, older affiliated surnames suggest earlier New World liaisons from a heroic age when Frenchmen still numbered in just two digits. Some names match those of untraceable recruits mustered for Quebec exactly 400 years ago by the first viceroy of Nouvelle France. Had the scribes not lost track of their lives and offspring, perhaps fewer young men who debut in these pages would have to be called orphans without a past.

Chapter 1

Three men from Normandy

The French farming village of Saint-Germain-le-Vasson lies about ten miles south of the bustling city of Caen in Normandy. This location near the seacoast placed both the city and the village squarely in the path of the allied Normandy invasion of June 1944. Historic Caen was blasted to smithereens. Advancing armored columns tore through the mostly level fields of crops around it. Today the surrounding countryside also contains sprawling cemeteries full of fallen soldiers from many nations.

A succession of Gallic tribes, Roman legions, Frankish knights and Viking raiders had already left their mark on this contested region. The old parish of St.-Germain-le-Vasson traditionally belonged to the ancient diocese of Bayeux. The cathedral city of Bayeux, about 25 miles northwest of St.-Germain-le-Vasson, occupied a precious niche in the history of medieval Europe.

The violation of a solemn oath of fealty sworn probably under duress there at the altar of the still unfinished cathedral was the sacrilegious act that provoked Duke William of Normandy to invade and conquer AngloSaxon England in 1066. The oath-breaker, at least in William’s eyes, was his disloyal vassal and erstwhile comrade-in-arms, Harold, the earl of Wessex, who reigned briefly as king of England until he perished in battle at Hastings. Visitors from around the world still throng Bayeux each year to view the lofty cathedral and its venerable tapestry crafted by Kentish monks to commemorate the Norman conquest (Annex A).

Tiny St.-Germain-le-Vasson, first mentioned in 1228 as Sanctus Germanus de Wachon, has nothing to match Bayeux’s soaring Romanesque-Gothic cathedral. But its own church, with a tall belfry dating from the 14th Century, is surprisingly massive for a farming village of fewer than a thousand souls. It is also a fitting point of departure for our own New World story, although the family surname can no longer be detected on the weathered tombstones leaning at drunken angles in the churchyard. From this bucolic parish, according to an early church record of colonial Québec, came the pioneering émigré named Pierre Roberge, our direct paternal ancestor. Two other Roberge men, an older brother and a supposed half-brother, also crossed the Atlantic to Canada at roughly that same time about 350 years ago.

The French surname, Roberge, first appeared in civil and church records of New France around 1660 upon the arrival from Normandy of an educated marchand bourgeois named Denis Roberge. Two younger men, both named Pierre Roberge, then entered Quebec’s annals when they were confirmed as practicing Catholics in 1664 and 1665 respectively. No other men with their surname ever came to Canada during the French colonial era, the records show.

All three Roberge men appeared in Quebec census reports of 1666, 1667 and 1681 for Quebec’s capital region, Comté de Montmorency. Each man married and raised a large family. The descendants of Denis Roberge, oldest of the three, can no longer be traced in North America. But those of the two Pierres number in the thousands today.

Thought to have been brothers, the two Pierres have often been confused with one another. Differentiating nicknames, La Croix and La Pierre, are usually added to tell their two collateral families apart. Both men homesteaded permanently on Ile d'Orléans, a large island in the St. Lawrence River within sight of fortress Québec. Denis Roberge, a prominent Catholic layman who served the vicar of Québec, seems to have been a patron of one or both younger men, giving rise to a belief that he was their older half-brother.

The youngest of this trio from Normandy was the man who implanted our direct paternal family line (Annex B) in the New World. This Pierre Roberge, first of the La Pierre branch, was one of twelve Catholics confirmed at the main parish of Notre Dame de Québec on 7 November 1665. The event generated the first written mention of the ancestor in colonial records. He would have been about 14 years old.

The first seven North American generations of male descendants of Pierre Roberge, born ~1651:

Pierre Roberge [m. 1679 Ste. Famille, Ile d'Orléans, Québec] Françoise Loignon

Pierre Roberge [m. 1726 Chateau Richer, Québec)] Marie Le François

Prisque Roberge [m. 1761 St. Pierre, Ile d'Orléans] Agathe Goulet

Ambroise Roberge [1st m. 1793 St. Laurent, Ile d'Orléans] Louise Pouliot

Jean Roberge [m. 1826 Ste. Claire, Dorchester, Québec] Christine Bourgault

François Roberge [2nd m. 1870 St. Alphonsus, Glens Falls, New York] Marcelline Boisvert

Edouard Roberge aka Edward B. Roby [m. 1905 Troy, New York] Mary Ellen Dwyer

Described in the 1666 Talon census as an 18-year-old weaver of cloth, our man would be the bachelor who later married local teenager Françoise Loignon in Ste.-Famille parish of Ile d'Orléans on 3 July 1679 and then sired her 13 children. The marriage record1 in the parish registry says this Pierre Roberge was the son of Jacques Roberge and Claudine Buret, or Borel, of the parish of St.-Germain-le-Vasson in the diocese of Bayeux.

Since the same parents and parish in Normandy had been given for the other Pierre Roberge at his first marriage on 22 October 1672 in the same island parish, the two men are believed to have been brothers from what is now the Caen district of Normandy’s modern department of Calvados. Roberge remains a fairly common surname in that northwestern corner of France. And the former province of Normandy was the origin of at least one in five early settlers of colonial New France.

Doubt about the origin of the two Pierres

Nevertheless, a shadow of doubt lengthens over the actual origin, parentage and background of our 17th-Century patriarch. Authoritative genealogists either disagree or have grown uncomfortable with crucial facts about the two Pierres and their Norman French parents. Fichier Origine, keeper of Quebec's hallowed list of early pioneers based on cooperative research done in their European home parishes and archives, no longer lists the three Roberge men as emigrés. This means that no reliable trace of them can be found in France.

Both Pierres lack baptismal certificates. Québec’s church marriage documents state that they, unlike the educated Denis Roberge, were unable to sign their names. No ship’s manifest shows either one ever arriving from France alone or accompanied. And this was a passage that our ancestor, the younger of the two, would have to have made as a youth of no more than 14 years.

In the late 19th Century, a trailblazing opus of Quebec genealogist Cyprien Tanguay seems to have matched the two Pierres with the wrong wives.2 The identical names of the two patriarchs invite confusion. Nor did it help that a second-generation Pierre, the son of our Lapierre patriarch, would eventually marry a young woman of the same Le François family as her aunt, the wife of Pierre, the Lacroix patriarch. Tanguay was also silent on the origin of our ancestor, noting only the common French place of origin for Denis Roberge and for the older Pierre.

A century later, University of Montréal genealogist René Jetté seems have sorted out the spouses of the brothers Pierre Roberge.3 His version makes sense because it comports with the 1681 census that lists the two Roberge couples with their ages. Jetté identified the thrice-married older brother, Pierre Roberge dit Lacroix, as a half-brother of Denis Roberge. They seem to have had a different mother but the same father. Jacques Roberge of the diocese of Bayeux supposedly had first married Denis’ mother, Andrée Le Marchand, in France around 1627.

The idea that Denis Roberge was the half-brother of the two younger men has also been abandoned by Programme de Recherche en Démographie Historique (PRDH), Québec's authoritative genealogy databank. Internet genealogy organizations Nos Origines and Wikitree take note of this change. Quebec’s Nos Origines now describes Jacques Roberge, the supposed father of all three Roberge émigrés, as d'origine inconnue – a person of unknown origin. Apparently, as Fichier Origine found, neither Jacques nor his two supposed wives ever cast a shadow in the New World and left no trace on the other side of the Atlantic. One might even wonder, with Tanguay, whether the two Pierres really were sons of the same father and mother.

Denis Roberge is known to have married Geneviève Aubert at Chateau Richer sometime during the period 1667-1669. Parents of the Quebec-born bride were Beauport royal notary Claude Aubert and Jacqueline Lucas, whom Métis historian Dick Garneau said was English. Thomas Morell, a priest who had sailed with Denis from France in 1660, conducted that wedding. This can be gleaned from an undated parish notice of the marriage, edited by a different priest, François Fillon, and from a civil marriage contract made at an unspecified location in Québec and dated 3 June 1667.4

The official paper trail for Pierre Roberge dit La Croix also looks suspicious – until his third marriage in 1684. Properly signed marriage certificates for his first two unions are missing. There is only an unsigned notice from 22 October 1672 that names Denis Roberge as a witness to Pierre’s first marriage with Antoinette De Beaurenom in the parish of Ste.-Famille, I.O., which was still technically in the orbit of the main parish of Notre-Dame-de-Québec.

This French first wife, the daughter of Guillaume De Beaurenom and Françoise Le Poupet of Normandy’s diocese of Coutances, seems to be the same woman also called Bagot or Bagau and sometimes Bascon in other documents, including a civil marriage contract written by Beauport seigneurial notary Paul Vachon. Antoinette must have died childless.

Roberge’s second marriage, to Marie Chabot, daughter of Mathurin Chabot and Marie Mesange, was annulled 8 January 1684, according to a civil document cited by Jetté. Therefore all of this Pierre’s seven children came from his third marriage in 1684 to Marie Le François, daughter of Charles Le François and Marie Triot, or Triaut, from Chateau Richer, Quebec.

As Tanguay noted, Denis Roberge was a “confiant de François [de Montmorency] Laval, monseigneur”, the vicar of Québec. He was also involved with Laval’s Séminaire de Québec, directed by Henri de Bernières. As the vicar’s principal deputy, this priest became the first resident pastor of the main parish, Notre Dame de Québec. Laval, remembered as Quebec’s first bishop, had sailed to Canada in 1659, accompanied by Henri De Bernières. Denis Roberge followed them in 1660. All three men had previously been instructed in Caen at a lay seminary run by De Bernières’ uncle.

The common parentage and origin of the two illiterate Pierres has long been treated as academic doctrine. The sole source of this information may have been Denis Roberge, the church official from Bayeux who apparently vouched for the older Pierre at his 1672 wedding and again in 1684. He would have been a highly credible source for local parish priests who were well aware of Denis’ close association with the supreme ecclesiastic authorities he served.

Denis Roberge’s word on the background of the two Pierres may be perfectly factual. But it retains a whiff of genealogical hearsay as long as Fichier Origine, the seasoned research team of Federation québecoise des sociétés de généalogie, cannot find any such family in French archives.

Ethnic label in the parish registry

The quandary of the identity of the Roberge brothers goes deeper. A surviving document recording the third marriage of the older Pierre implies that he was native American. Its existence was generously called to our family’s attention by an historian of the Anderdon Nation, Wyandotte/Wyandot/Wendat (Huron) confederation.

This unsigned parish certificate is part of a 17th Century parish marriage registry transcribed in a parish scribe’s uniform penmanship from the original marriage acts written by different priests who actually gave the blessings to the wedding couples. It includes the 10 April 1684 marriage of Pierre Roberge and Marie Le François at the parish of Chateau Richer. Appearing in the left-hand margin under the names of the couple, as with a few other nuptials in this parish registry, is the descriptive word “aboriginal”.

A proprietary image of the archived Canadian document, shared under international licensing terms, may be viewed on internet ancestry research sites in North America. In lieu of the protected image, the transcribed text of the scribe’s true copy can be rendered roughly as follows:

Identically worded but less legible was the original marriage certificate. This document5 from Chateau Richer translates as follows:

The year one-thousand six-hundred eighty-four, the tenth day of April, following the engagement and the publication of the banns of marriage read on three consecutive Sundays between Pierre Roberge, widower of the late Antoinette Bagot, of the parish of St. Paul, age fortyseven years, for the one party; and Marie LeFrançois, daughter of Charles LeFrançois and Marie Trio, his wife, of age twenty-five for the other party; and having found no impediments, I the undersigned priest, pastor of this parish, having received their mutual consent to the proposed marriage, have given the nuptial benediction according to the rite prescribed by our Holy Mother the Roman Church in the presence of Charles Le François, Denys Roberge and Felix Auber, who have signed; with said bridegroom Pierre Roberge having declared that he could not sign as required by the ordinance.[translation]

[signatures:] Charles Le François, Denis Roberge, Felix Auber, Guillaume Gaultier, priest

An image of the original is in the collection of Quebec’s Drouin Institute of Genealogy. Written and signed by the parish pastor, Guillaume Gaultier, at Chateau Richer on 10 April 1684, it bears the signatures of Denis Roberge and the two other witnesses mentioned. Unlike the unsigned parish notice regarding this Pierre’s first marriage in 1672, this one makes no mention of the bridegroom’s French origin or parents. If he was aboriginal, perhaps his French surname had been conferred by Denis.

The Chateau Richer marriage registry copy plainly marked “aboriginal” raises obvious questions: Were the Roberge brothers, who suddenly surfaced in the chronicles of New France in the mid-1660s, really just newcomers from France? If not, what were they? Since historic demography leaves hardly another likely choice in an early colonial setting where Europeans were still thin on the ground, one possible answer comes to mind: The brothers were Christian natives. If so, they would most likely have been of the Huron nation. A hypothetical case for that supposition proceeds from historic circumstances:

The two Pierres were among the earliest settlers of Ile d'Orléans, first visited by Jacques Cartier in 1535. The natives called the place Minigo before Cartier renamed the island Bacchus because of its profusion of wild grapevines. The presence of Denis Roberge, who once owned an estate on Ile d'Orléans, dates to 1666, according to a current history of the island.6 This source says that our family patriarch was living there by 1669 and his older brother took up residence nearby the following year. A survey map of the island prepared in 1689 by a royal engineer, Sieur de Villeneuve, identifies the houses and lands of both men. Furthermore, Pierre Aloignon, or Loignon, the father-in-law of our paternal ancestor (Annex B), had previously settled on that island after serving an indenture to Noël Juchereau at Chateau Richer beginning 1647. The island’s historic profile informs us that this pioneer was already living there around 1656.

Ile d'Orléans and Wendat refugees

That date merits a second look because Ile d'Orléans at that time was still divided into small farms assigned by the Jesuits to Christianized Amerindians. These initial settlers were refugees – men, women and children of a nation the French called Huron. They called themselves Wendat (Wyandotte, Wyandot) and their tribal homeland lay far to the West in what is now south-central Ontario between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe. The Jesuit missionary fathers at Quebec city envisaged the fertile Ile d'Orléans as a new home for these surviving Christian converts who had fled eastward in their canoes to Quebec in 1650.7

The conversion of the Wendat people of the Great Lakes had been an early obsession with the French missionary orders because these native Americans were highly regarded as intelligent and civilized aboriginals. Traditionally they lived in temporary villages of long houses and raised food crops, supplemented by seasonal hunting and fishing. Their culture and language were closely related to that of the five Iroquois nations south of Lake Ontario. The Wendat confederation north of lakes Huron and Erie quickly staked out a pivotal role as intermediaries in French trading with more remote tribes. This seemingly gainful association with the newcomers eventually proved their undoing.

Devastated by deadly European contagions, the once-powerful Wendat confederation gradually lost cohesion in the 1640s amid factional strife between traditionalists and those who embraced the religion of the French. Incessant attacks by their heathen Iroquois cousins then precipitated the collapse and dispersal of the remaining Wendat. Panic scattered them in all directions. The flight of some Wendat converts and their missionaries to Quebec in 1650 marked the end of a once promising Great Lakes tribal mission first launched by Joseph Le Caron (1586-1632) and his Franciscan Recollet priests in 1616.

The new homeland on Ile d'Orléans also proved vulnerable to Iroquois raids against the French and their native allies. A couple of displaced Wendat clans eventually chose to save themselves by leaving the island. Some accepted an invitation to join the Iroquois confederation. But chronicles also reveal that one group of settlers belonging to the clan of the Cord sought safety among the French in 1657 at Fort St. Louis, a fortified corner of Québec city.

The path to assimilation in the colonial society of New France began at the church. Given their apparent links to Denis Roberge, the two Pierres presumably benefited from his position with the Séminaire de Québec, which held title to much of Ile d'Orléans starting 1666. Tanguay described Denis Roberge as a devout Catholic layman from Bayeux who sailed to Canada with the priest, [Thomas] Morell, in 1660 in order to serve Quebec’s apostolic vicar and later its first bishop, François de Montmorency-Laval.8

Denis had been a student and servant of de Bernières, wrote Tanguay, referring to Catholic mystic Jean de Bernières, founder of l'Ermitage de Caen, where both his nephew Henri and Denis Roberge had trained, and where his close friend, Laval, had also studied. Given this intensely religious orbit, it wouldn't be unthinkable that young and promising Christian natives, maybe also the two Pierres, had been temporarily dispatched for instruction there before Jean died in 1659.

Though speculative, the scenario is not far-fetched. The presence of acculturated Hurons at many St. Lawrence settlements, including Beauport and Quebec, is on record. An historic Wendat community dating from 1697 still thrives next to the capital city at Jeune-Lorette. A number of displaced Huron families had also moved onto the nearby Sillery réduction for aboriginal Christians as early as 1673. They were still living there when Louis XIV granted a new seigneurial charter solely to the Jesuits in 1699.

The 1647 royal charter of this mission seigneurie had specifically given it to “néophyte sauvages chretiens” under Jesuit supervision. The king annulled this grant after being told that the original Algonquin and Montagnais residents had abandoned the reservation. But the ancient charter granted during the regency of Louis’ mother, Anne d'Autriche, still underpins a legal claim to Sillery that the Hurons continue to assert today, despite rejections and rebuffs by successive governments.9

A number of researchers have also seen signs of a Huron presence on Ile d'Orléans after 1657. It is argued, for example, that the island couple Pierre Blais and Anne Perrault, neighbors of the Roberge, were actually Hurons. This couple married 1669 at Ste. Famille parish, Ile d'Orléans, and raised some of their 10 children there. A couple of their descendants even married into the Roberge lines.

The family background of the wife of our Pierre Roberge dit La Pierre may hold a clue, since her father was reportedly already living on the island in 1656. Françoise Loignon would be of mixed blood because her mother, Françoise Roussin, was métisse, wrote historian Dick Garneau in “New France 1650-1653” of his chronological series. Françoise Roussin, born about 1631, was the daughter of Jean Roussin de Tourouvre, who died 1643 at Trois Rivières, said Garneau. He said that this sparsely documented Jean could have been the son of Nicolas Roussin, who joined Champlain in Quebec in 1619 and whose family was likely deported to France in 1629 during a brief English takeover.10 He was indeed one of 80 early recruits for Quebec listed by Admiral Henri II de Montmorency, who was in charge of France’s oversees colonies in the 1620s.

A genealogy published by Université de Caen on the Roussin family tells a different story. Here, Françoise Roussin (1631-1691) and three other children of Jean Roussin (1597-~1681) and Madeleine Giguère (1605-~1650) were baptized at Saint-Aubin church in Tourouvre, Perche, in France, and followed their father to Canada after 1650 as indentured servants. But a 12 June 1622 marriage certificate of the parents at Saint Aubin identifies the bride as Jeanne, not Madeleine. Other references cite more than one Jean Roussin.

Certain at least is that Françoise Roussin married Perche emigré Pierre Loignon at fort Québec on 8 October 1652. Françoise Loignon, the wife of our Pierre Roberge, was one of this couple’s 12 children.11 This prolific pair launched one of Canada’s enduring first families.

There are more than four thousand persons in North America today with the common Roberge surname or such derivatives as Roby. Most, if not all, would have to trace their paternal line directly to one of the two Pierres of Ile d'Orléans, where direct descendants can still be found. Even in colonial times the island became crowded enough to boast five parishes chartered between 1666 and 1680.

The Roberge surname has spread far and wide through Canada and the United States but is especially well represented in the parishes around Quebec city. The direct line now known as Roby migrated to the northeastern United States in the late 19th Century from a quiet corner of Quebec located north of frontier with western Maine and New Hampshire. The particular Roberge dit Lapierre family tree reconstructed in this manuscript relies largely on the updated database of the University of Montreal's PRDH, now managed by Institut généalogique Drouin.

–

Notes:

1 Programme de recherche en démographie historique (PRDH), Université de Montréal. PRDG-IGD's marriage #32659, with underlying Institut généalogique Drouin image _d1p_30780121.jpg, is apparently the registry entry for the marriage of Pierre Roberge dit La Pierre and Françoise Loignon at Ste. Famille parish, Ile d'Orléans, on 3 July 1679. The four-line certificate at the foot of the right-hand page, of which the corner is damaged and missing, is scarcely legible. A family sheet for this union is PRDH-IGD #4843.

2 Tanguay, Cyprien, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes depuis la fondation de la colonie jusqu'a nos jours (DGFC), vol. 1, É. Sénécal, Montréal: p. 521. Citing Auguste Gosselin's 1890 book Vie de Mgr. Laval, p. 22, Tanguay describes Denys as an éleve et domestique of de Bernières [Jean de Bernières, founder of l'Ermitage de Caen]. DGFC, vol. 1, p. 521

3 Jetté, René. Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec des origines à 1730 (DGFQ). Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1983: pp. 992-993

4 Ibid.

5 PRDG-IGD's marriage #30228, with underlying Institut généalogique Drouin image _d1p_30791511.jpg, is the priest's signed original certificate for the marriage of Pierre Roberge dit La Croix and Marie Le François at Chateau Richer on 10 April 1684. An unexplained image of what appears to be a similar document signed by Charles Amador Martin was found on the site, Family Search. Martin was the parish pastor at Beauport, the seigneurie of Robert Giffard, the Champlain-era veteran who recruited Canada's second wave of French colonists starting 1632.

6 Dates of arrival on Ile d'Orleans are given for 317 families at <https://www.quebeciledorleans.com/en/discover/genealogy>; the three Roberge families are among about three dozen with commemorative monuments on the island, sometimes called the cradle of New France.

7 Peace, Thomas and Kathryn Magee Labelle. From Huronia to Wendakes – Adversity, Migrations and Resilience 1650-1900. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 2016: p. 7; see also <http://tourisme.iledorleans.com/liledorleans/histoire-de-lile-dorleans/>; and, Labelle, Kathryn Magee. Dispersed But Not Destroyed. University of British Columbia Press, 2014, for historic background on the Wendat/Huron nations, their collapse and diapora.

8 Tanguay, DGFC, vol. 1, p. 521. Citing Auguste Gosselin's 1890 book Vie de Mgr. Laval, p. 22, Tanguay describes Denys as an elève and domestique de M. de Bernières [Jean de Bernières, founder of l'Ermitage de Caen]. He says Denys went to Canada with M. Moral as donné in 1660, became „confiant de François [de Montmorency] Laval, monseigneur“ and served the church until his death in 1709.

9 Lavoie, Michel. C'est ma seigneurie que je réclame. La lutte des Hurons de Lorette pour la seigneurie de Sillery, 1650-1890. Boréal, Montréal 2010

10 Garneau, Dick. “New France 1650-1653”. <www.metishistory.info/french15.shtml> and <www.metis-history.info/french6.shtml>

11 “Famille Roussin et Giguère” <http://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/prefen/notices/ 12779jr.pdf>; see also Jetté, DGFQ: pp. 738-739

Chapter 2

Farmers, fishermen, family founders

Imagine a 17th Century frontier family with 13 children, of whom eight reached adulthood and seven married to form new households. Pierre Roberge and Françoise Loignon launched the Roberge dit La Pierre clan with exactly this prolific feat, nearly unthinkable now in an age of hedonism. Little wonder that Ile d'Orléans, dubbed the cradle of New France, still has a stone monument commemorating their achievement.

Large families were officially encouraged. The Talon census of 1666 found only 45 eligible French women between the ages of 16 and 40, although the colony listed 719 single French males in the same age bracket. Although the crown dispatched a regiment of soldiers and about 800 marriageable girls in the same decade, the imbalance took years to level.

Pierre and Françoise raised their family mostly in the parish of St.-Pierre near the western edge of that island in the St. Lawrence River. Our direct paternal line from this founding couple then continued through a son named Pierre. Born there in 1697, he was christened with the same given name as his first-born brother who had died at age 14. Pierre junior is the second-generation ancestor who married Marie Le François of Chateau Richer on 21 October 1726.

An older brother, named Joseph, was baptized at St.-Pierre, I.O., in 1690. He may be better known in Québec because his large collateral family line became prominent local landowners on the south bank of the St. Lawrence. Joseph Roberge married Geneviève Le Duc at Notre Dame de Québec in 1716. She was the granddaughter of a founder of the fishing village of Etchemin, where the northward flowing river named for the Etchemin tribe (Malécite, Passamaquoddy) joins the St. Lawrence across from Sillery. Joseph received a tract of land there from his father-in-law.

So numerous are the descendants of Joseph and Geneviève that there were at least 25 Roberge families in St. Romuald d'Etchemin parish by the start of the 20th Century.1

In his fin-de-siècle parish history, Benjamin Demers, Etchemin’s local curé, offered a picturesque account of the place before the great forests were cleared for farmland. A party of Hurons and Frenchmen in two or three canoes dispatched from north-shore fort Quebec scouted the south shore in 1651. Picked as an ideal spot for their future fishing village was this location at the confluence of rivers on the western fringe of Etchemin territory with a view of the Algonquin réduction of Sillery on the north shore.

Ile d'Orléans is the large island at upper right. Shown are other parishes where early family records are often found.

Their 33-year-old leader, Eustache Lambert, had toiled as a donné for the Jesuits’ in the pays d'en haut, tribal territories, until the missionaries had to flee from the West to Quebec with their Huron converts.2

Another brother of Joseph and Pierre in this second generation was Charles Roberge. He wed Marie Madeleine Coté, who would have been a granddaughter of Françoise Roussin, the patriarch’s arguably métisse mother in law. That would make the couple second cousins unless one spouse had been adopted. And Marie Thérese, born in 1709 as the youngest daughter of the Roberge founding couple, apparently migrated westward with her husband upriver to Yamachiche.

Over the years, sons and daughters in the Roberge dit Lapierre line chose spouses from such other old families as Le François, Coté, Le Duc, Blouard, Ratté, Brousard, Goulet, Drouin, Pouliot, Paradis, Couture, Guyon/Dion, Le Brun Carrier, Gagnon, Lacroix, Bourgault and Boisvert (Annex B).

Surviving civil records of our first-generation ancestor, Pierre Roberge dit Lapierre, suggest that he concentrated mainly on the welfare of his family and the calm conservation of its assets. Pierre and five other men, for example, petitioned to recover a concealed legacy of one thousand livres from their deceased in-laws, Pierre Loignon and Françoise Roussin. Their joint complaint was made on behalf of their wives, each one a daughter of the deceased couple.

It was discovered that Françoise Roussin, just before her death in 1691, had stashed the money away in a place she revealed only to Charles Loignon, a favored offspring who was still a legal minor. Conseil Souverain ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in a decision signed on 30 June 1692 by Louis Rouer de Villeray, Quebec’s attorney general. Charles’ guardian was ordered to turn over the cash in equal shares to the couple's rightful heirs.3

Our ancestor’s brother, Pierre Roberge dit Lacroix, apparently made a more controversial debut in polite colonial society. Early records reveal an impulsive man of action. On 11 July 1670 Conseil Souverain, the supreme provincial authority, entered a judgement against this Pierre for assaulting and injuring neighbor Mathurin Thibaudeau in the presence of his wife and others on Ile d'Orléans.4 Early the following year a more serious criminal case came before the admiralty court. Pierre Roberge dit Lacroix, Alexandre Turpin and the soldier Abraham Aubin dit Lafontaine were accused in the slaying of a man named Saintonge, a soldier based at Quebec's Fort Saint Louis.5

Whatever the outcome of that trial, Pierre’s deportment must have moderated no later than 10 October 1671. That was the day when Quebec royal notary Romain Becquet witnessed a marriage contract between him and Antoinette Bagau. The church wedding held in 1672 at Ste. Famille, I.O., was witnessed by Denis Roberge. The childless marriage endured until Antoinette died about 12 years later.

The Roberge name appears repeatedly in civil records for the next two centuries. The most intriguing episode makes mention of half a dozen Roberge men, who were implicated or tried in connection with transgressions during the 1838 rebellion. But these names cannot easily be assigned by family to the Lapierre or Lacroix line.

Compared with the two Pierres, Denis Roberge was a minor celebrity in and around Quebec town and particularly Pierre Roberge dit Lacroix seems to have been his protegé. Both Pierres may have initially become established on Ile d'Orléans thanks to Denis’ excellent connections. The career of this influential lay official of the church is worth a closer look for what it may reveal about the two Pierres and their families, who led quieter lives in relative obscurity.

Evangelist mystics from l'Ermitage de Caen

Upon his arrival in Quebec in 1660, the devout Denis Roberge immediately entered the service of Mgr. François de Montmorency-Laval, Quebec’s apostolic vicar, who had arrived the previous year. Denis would have been about 35 years old when he reached Canada, the year after the death of his first spiritual mentor in Normandy. As a newcomer officially described as a marchand-bourgeois, property transactions, administration and financing appear to have been among his specialties. Soon to be regarded as Laval’s confidant, this loyal former acolyte from the Ermitage de Caen then remained loyal to Quebec’s revered bishop for the rest of his life.

When Laval acquired Ile d'Orléans from a principal of Compagnie des Cent-Associés in 1666, Denis Roberge was apparently dispatched to manage the island seigneurie, which would become an asset of the new Séminaire de Quebec.6 Contracts notarized by Beauport notary Paul Vachon also reveal that Roberge acquired an estate on Ile d'Orléans and later sold it. Circumstances suggest that Denis Roberge was dealing for Mgr. Laval and his new Quebec seminary, directed by Henri de Bernières, who had also been made the first permanent pastor of the main parish of Notre Dame de Québec.

Denis Roberge’s close links to both of those two high-ranking priests were undoubtedly forged first in Normandy. In the previous decade all three men had crossed paths at the Ermitage de Caen, a lay seminary of Jean de Bernières de Louvigny (1602-1659). This celebrated Catholic mystic, the uncle of Henri de Bernières, was also a close friend and spiritual guide to Mgr. Laval.

In the wake of religious wars of the previous century, the teachings of the Caen seminary were part of a back-to-basics spiritual revival that spread beyond Normandy. Ermitage de Caen in the ancient diocese of Bayeux placed its emphasis on a life of asceticism, religious contemplation and the devotion to the charitable works that had distinguished early Christianity. Jean de Bernières’ theology resonated with many prominent churchmen and a few civic leaders who would later apply his teachings in colonial New France.7

An aristocrat who had served as Caen’s royal property custodian, the Ermitage founder renounced his inheritance, dedicating himself to theological instruction. As a humble member of a secular Franciscan third order, his teachings later circulated widely in Europe under the title Chrétien Intérieur, published posthumously by his sister Jourdaine de Bernières, founder of Caen’s Ursuline cloister, collocated with Jean’s Ermitage. An earlier Norman seminary of the religious mystic, Jean Eudes, had been shut down by the bishop of Bayeux. And de Bernières’ opus was eventually placed on the index in 1689. But his ideas had already taken root in Quebec.

Mgr. Laval (1622-1708), the ordained son of an ancient noble family in the diocese of Chartres, also passed up a substantial inheritance to pursue a higher calling in the New World. He was destined to be beatified as the saintly first bishop of Quebec. On 13 April 1659, shortly before Jean de Bernières’ death in Caen, Laval departed for Canada as the newly appointed apostolic vicar of New France. Dubbed the Apostle of Canada by his biographer, Laval was accompanied by Caen-born Henri de Bernières (~1635-1700), a promising junior cleric who also renounced his family fortune and came directly from his uncle’s Ermitage.8

On 17 June, an enthusiastic civic welcome marked the arrival of their ship at Québec. The same day, Laval found time to baptize a newborn Huron infant and personally to administer last rites to a dying native boy. On 24 August he presided at a confirmation ceremony for scores of Algonquin and Huron Christians, with ritual prayers in their own languages as well as Latin and French. A great feast was held at Quebec’s Jesuit college to celebrate the Amerindian Catholics. The apostolic vicar’s keen interest in indigenous converts even caused some of his own countrymen to wonder whether they would be neglected.9 In the evangelistic spirit of the Council of Trent, Laval clearly had an agenda.

In Laval’s time French and native Christians were confirmed together at Québec, with or without reference to origin or background. A confirmation ceremony for 17 parishioners on 2 February 1660, for example, identified Charles Le François as having come originally from the archdiocese of Rouen in Normandy but Adrien Hayot and Louis Joliet were listed as being of undetermined origin. Laval later financed Jesuit-trained Joliet’s initial fur trading venture among the Amerindians before Joliet gained lasting fame as an explorer and cartographer of North America.10

In 1660 the vicar ordained Henri de Bernières, who would become his principal deputy. According to his priestly 19th Century biographer, Auguste Honoré Gosselin, Laval tasked the young priest to learn the Iroquoian language, which would include the Huron tongue. That would scarcely be possible without the help of native speakers, but none are identified. De Bernières was named superior of the new Séminaire de Québec chartered by Laval in 1663. This seminary took on the role of training future parish priests for Québec’s theocracy, helping to free the various religious orders to concentrate on missionary work farther afield.

The following year, young de Bernières was also given the dual assignment of permanent resident pastor of the parish of Notre-Dame-de-Québec. This main parish initially included neighboring