Marguerite Picard (aft. 1753)

Born after Aug 1753 in St-Esprit, Île Royale, Acadie, Nouvelle-France

Ancestors

Wife of Mathurin DesRoches — married about 1780 in Rustico, PEI

Descendants

Died [date unknown] in Rustico, Colony of St. John's Island

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Biography

Marguerite was born after the 1752 Census of Sieur de LaRoque. ^[1] Mathurin Picard is listed at St. Esprit with his wife, but no children in July-Aug 1753. ^[2]

She definitely wound up in Prince Edward Island, where she first married Jacques-Ange Haché dit Gallant, grandson of the celebrated Michel Haché dit Gallant and Anne Cormier, who, in 1720, were among the first Acadians to relocate to PEI (Île St. Jean) from the mainland after the latter went permanently into English hands. As a widow with children, she remarried Mathurin DesRoches and settled at Rustico (or may already have been at Rustico in her first marriage, since Gallants were among the founders of that village).^[3]

13. Mathurin DesRoches, private, served for three months, at £ 2 per month. He was a younger brother of Jean DesRoches (No. 10, above), but the dates of his birth and death are unknown, although he was probably about twenty years old in 1776. About 1780 he married Marguerite Picard, daughter of Mathurin Picard and Angélique Bonin and widow of Jacques-Ange Haché dit Gallant. He settled at Rustico, on St. John’s Island (from 1799 onward, Prince Edward Island). Mathurin and Marguerite had four sons.^[4]

Research Notes

The remainder of this entry does not pertain directly to Magdelaine, except for what is excerpted in the above biography. It should be put into a space page for broader reference (Bourque-573 01:28, 10 February 2024 (UTC)) A Note on Our Québec Ancestors by John Estano deRoche (1 July 2011) ((footnote 1: The original text of this little "essay" included pictures & some hyperlinks, omitted here. I hope to be able to deal with that shortfall eventually.)) ((footnote 2: This is not a “scholarly” account. I’m omitting citation of sources, except for the pictures. But the hyperlinks send you to a few of those many, many sources that I’ve consulted. Please note that the sources vary considerably in their scholarship, often contradict each others details, and include much borrowing of one from another (often spreading – and embroidering – errors, in the process). I can’t guarantee the precise accuracy of what I’ve written here, although I’m confident that most of it is valid.))

Québec City was established as a French post 1608 under the leadership of Samuel de Champlain. French settlers literally numbered only a handful for several years. One of the first “waves” of serious settlement began in 1634, sponsored by physician Robert Giffard, who had been granted a huge seigneurie (major feudal estate), named Beauport, a few kilometres downriver from Québec itself, on condition that he bring in settlers to develop the colony. Giffard was from an interior region of southern Normandy then known as Perche, from the part that is now the département of Orne, in the diocese of Sées. Focusing on craftsmen, he recruited several families and a few young bachelors from the towns and villages of his home district, especially the township of Mortagne-au-Perche, including St-Langis-dès-Mortagne and Tourouvre.

Our Two Percheron Settler Families Our ancestors include two households who joined the first phase of the migration of the “Percherons”. First came the men, in 1634: two stonemasons, Jean Guyon (Dion) and Marin Boucher, plus 17-year-old François Boucher, whose deceased mother (Julienne Baril aka Barrie), was Marin Boucher’s first wife. Boucher’s second wife, Perrine Maillet, with her children and other stepchildren, came over in 1635, as did Guyon’s wife Mathurine Marie Robin and their children.

((Footnote 3: The young Jean Guyon was one of the two masons who built a stone stairway to the first floor of the bell tower of the church in Tourouve, near his home town. The work is still there. Also: Note that it was standard practice, among the French of this era, for married women to be known by their father’s surname rather than their husband’s.))

Within Beauport, Guyon named his grant le Buisson and was thus known as the Sieur Du Buisson. ((Footnote 4: le buisson literally designates "the thicket" – but Buisson is also the names of several places in France and is also a surname.)) Technically, once Giffard allocated land to these immigrants, they became his vassals, although the residual feudal obligations were quite minimal. Nevertheless, one of my favorite stories about Jean Guyon is that he (among others) wanted no truck with vassalage. Apparently he found every possible means to avoid paying taxes to Giffard, and especially to refrain from the annual obligation to kneel and swear loyalty to the Seigneur. In 1646-47 at Québec, Guyon helped build the governor’s residence as well as the new parish church of Notre Dame de Québec. Mathurine Robin died in the spring of 1662, and Jean Guyon 11 months later, both at Beauport.

A little factoid about Marin Boucher’s earliest days in the colony: Boucher did some work for Champlain, who died in 1635. The will stated, “I give to Marin, mason, living near the house of the Recollet Fathers, the last suit that I had made from material which I got at the store”. After working the land on three different sites, including Beauport, Marin Boucher and Perrine Maillet finally settled their family in 1650 at Château-Richer, opposite l’Île d’Orléans, downriver from Québec City, between Beauport and Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré. Champlain had originally pinpointed this area for farming to supply the colony with produce. It seems that the Boucher-Maillet homestead became the local religious gathering-place, before a church was built in the area. Both Marin and Perrine were buried at Château-Richer.

Our Picard Settler Family A family of the Picardie region also emigrated to Québec City sometime in the 1630s. Pierre Gareman dit (nicknamed) Picard and Madeleine Charlot were from the tiny rural village of Bagneux, in the urban administration of Soissons, in the present-day département of l’Aisne. They arrived with two small daughters, Florence Gareman and Nicole, and established at Cap Rouge, upriver from Québec City (just upriver from the current bridge across the St. Lawrence), where they had another daughter Marguerite, then a son Charles. When Charles Gareman was age 10 in 1653, he and his father were working a field with his father when they were captured by Oneida Iroquois. Pierre Gareman le Picard purportedly was tortured and killed for the disgrace of being captured alive, while Charles was adopted into the Iroquois community, married there (Marie Gonnetenne), and became an ancestor of a considerable lineage. Subsequently, according to some accounts, wife-mother Madeleine Charlot was captured in another Iroquois raid, but then managed to escape, only to die later from her wounds.

Marriages and Migrations in New France On 3 Sept 1641, Florence Gareman (eldest daughter of Pierre and Madeleine), evidently still only 12 years old, married François Boucher (eldest son of Marin), age 24, at the early location of the church of Notre Dame de Québec, the parish church of Québec town. They established at St.-Joseph-de-Sillery, upriver a short distance from old Québec City, the site of a Jesuit mission that had been opened in 1638 for the Algonquin population of the area. François died there in the 1670s and Florence in 1686.

The Gareman and Boucher lines hooked up with the Guyons in the next generation. A daughter of François and Florence, Élizabeth Boucher, born 1646, was married at the age of 13 and a half to Denis Guyon in 1659, in the new Notre Dame de Québec (which, later destroyed and rebuilt recurrently, is now the archdiocesan cathedral). Denis was age 28. Having been born to Jean Guyon and Mathurine Robin back in France in 1631, he had crossed the Atlantic as a small child. Elizabeth died just before age 40, in the fall of 1685, in the old Lower Town of Québec, with the 54-year-old Denis following a month afterward.

It was Joseph Guyon, a son of Denis and Élizabeth, who brought our Québec ancestral line to Acadia (or, in French, Acadie). Ready for this? He and his brother François were pirates, bucaneers, corsairs, privateers. There is a technical distinction, whereby “pirates” are merely private entrepreneurs stealing for themselves, while privateers are private entrepreneurs who have the blessing of their own governments to attack “enemy” shipping. The Guyon brothers were the latter type. Joseph was baptised in Québec town in January of 1674. By age 21 in 1695, he was found recruiting a crew at Québec for the Philibusquier, the merchant-privateering ship owned by brother François, who was about eight years older. The accounts say that Joseph sailed as a lieutenant for François, but also did some privateering on his own. I didn’t find out how long this went on, although at least one account claimed they were operating as privateers out of Port Royal in Acadie. England and France signed a treaty in 1697, although they were back at war from 1702 to 1713. François died around 1701. I also didn’t learn whether Joseph was on deck in April of 1696 when François and his ship were captured and imprisoned in Boston, until released in a prisoner exchange at the end of that summer.

((Footnote 5: 1695-1696 falls within the period of war (1689-1697) known in the USA as King William’s War & in Canada & Britain as the War of the Grand Alliance or as War of the League of Augsburg or the Nine Years War (the first of the 4 major “Intercolonial Wars” – or, what are called in the USA, the “French & Indian Wars”). The 1702-1713 War of the Spanish Succession (aka Queen Anne’s War) ended with the final French surrender of Acadie and Newfoundland to the English, excepting Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island (Île Royale and Île St Jean) and leading to the founding of Louisbourg as a French fortress town.))

By the way, privateering had considerable significance for the Acadian settlers of the time – almost entirely negative. Both English (New England) and French privateers operated along the east coast, but of the northeastern English colonies were especially vexed by the losses that French raiders inflicted on their merchant transport vessels and on their fishing boats that harvested abundant cod along Acadian shores. This, despite the profitable (but mostly illegal or semi-legal) direct exchanges of New England manufactured goods etc. for Acadian farm products and the like. Consequently, Acadian farmers – essentially innocent bystanders – all around the Bay of Fundy suffered several rounds of devastating attacks by New England forces, in which these civilians had their homes emptied, their livestock slaughtered, and their buildings and field crops burned.

((Footnote 6: This theme is prominent in the French-language historical novel by Melvin Gallant about the Acadian settlement at Beaubassin (Amherst) from its founding to 1720: Le Métis de Beaubassin. Incidentally, the non-fictitious central character, Michel Haché dit Gallant, was the grandfather of Jacques-Ange Haché dit Gallant, first husband of Marguerite Picard, who remarried Mathurin DesRoches. (See below.)))

Around 1697, Joseph Guyon married an acadienne, Marguerite Dugas in Acadie. They may have lived for a time at Québec. At some stage, they lived at Plaisance (present-day Placentia), which was the French capital in Newfoundland until the 1713 treaty ceded the whole island to England and the population of Plaisance was transferred to Louisbourg to pioneer in the founding of that fortress town as the new headquarters of the French North Atlantic fishery. It seems that the couple and their four children were still at Plaisance at the latter point. Tt is documented that Joseph acquired land at Louisbourg and the family moved there in the summer of 1714 – a month before Joseph died. The inventory of his estate noted a house in Québec and another at Ste-Anne on Île Royale (present-day Englishtown on St. Ann’s Bay, Cape Breton). Marguerite Dugas was born around 1680, daughter of an Acadian-born couple, Martin Dugas and (in the mother's first marriage) Marguerite Petitpas, who lived at Port Royal and then les Mines (Grand Pré). When Marguerite Dugas was widowed in her early 30s in 1714, she was left with four children. After living for a time at the Louisbourg fishing outport of Grand Grève, she remarried François Cressonnet dit Beauséjour, a friend and associate, in the spring of 1717, thereby becoming the wife of a tavern-proprietor and innkeeper in the town of Louisbourg, catering to an upscale clientele. François reportedly was an excellent step-father. Which is just as well for Marguerite Guyon, born around 1704 (perhaps at Plaisance, but that is undocumented) to Joseph Guyon and Marguerite Dugas. Daughter Marguerite did not get to live in the household of her stepfather, at least not for long, for she (around age 13) and her mother celebrated weddings in the same year. The mother and stepfather were well connected around town. Their associates included the family of Louis Bonin (Bona, Bonnain) dit la Chaume and Françoise Chauvin, a successful merchant couple from the parish of Saint-Jacques de l’Houmeau, in the town of Angoulême, Charentes, France.

((Footnote 7: L’Houmeau, originally a “suburb” of Angoulême, was the ages-old riverside port of the town, on the riverbank immediately upstream from the ramparts. For centuries, l’Houmeau was the bustling commercial center for this economically and politically (militarily) important place. Note: I’m somewhat suspicious about the combination of persons and timing around the Bonin-dit-LaChaume family, and will be trying to check further.00

Louis Bonin had once been a sergeant at the Port Royal garrison before his career as a Louisbourg merchant. Their son Pierre Bonin dit la Chaume, at a very young age, had married a widow named Bernardine Vrigaud in 1712 at Plaisance in Newfoundland, only to be widowed in turn, very shortly thereafter, and joining the relocation to the new settlement at Louisbourg. By 1717, then, the respective families had brought together young Pierre Bonin and still-younger Marguerite Guyon for a marriage.

((Footnote 8: In fact, the families also brought together her brother Jean-Baptiste Guyon and Pierre’s sister Anne Bonin dit LaChaume as a couple in 1725.))

Pierre Bonin and Marguerite Guyon settled at the Louisbourg fishing outport village of St-Esprit, down the coast of Île Royale near the presently surviving Acadian village of L’Ardoise (where the surname Bona persists). Pierre was appointed harbourmaster there, and, like most fishing proprietors at French colonial Louisbourg and Plaisance, owned several shallops or chaloupes (small fishing boats) for which he hired crews of temporary male migrants from France. Marguerite managed the couple’s auberge (inn and tavern). When Pierre died in 1730 and was buried at the church in St-Esprit (no longer standing), Marguerite carried on with her business, marrying in 1735 a Plaisance native named Jean Perré.

Angelique Bonin was the youngest child of Pierre Bonin and Marguerite Guyon, arriving few months after her father’s death in 1730. Her story is sketchy, in my exploration so far. She did live beyond the final fall of Louisbourg to the English in 1758. She married Mathurin Picard (born around 1717), a native of Pléhérel (now called Fréhel) , a village on the north coast of Bretagne (Brittany), west of St. Malo. As of the 1752 census, they were at Petit de Grat (Île Madame, southern extremity of Île Royale) working as fishery entrepreneurs.

The rest of this story is recorded elsewhere. Meanwhile:

DesRoches-Picard son Hyacinthe DesRoches married acadienne Emélie LeBrun.

DesRoches-LeBrun son Alphonse DesRoches married Mary Ann Fortescue.

DesRoches-Fortescue son John Hyacinthe DeRoche married Eleanor Estano.

DeRoche-Estano son John Hutchins Fortescue DeRoche married Doris Pearl Colp (my parents).

Sources

1. ↑ Report Concerning Canadian Archives

   Mathurin Picard, fisherman, native of Pléhéret, bishopric of St. Brieux, aged 35 years - married to Angélique Romain [sic], native of St. Esprit, aged 21 years [no children listed]

   1752 Census of Sieur de LaRoque/Petit Degrat
2. ↑ Héritage Canadiana: Dépôt des papiers publics des colonies; état civil et recensements, image 588 1753 Census of Isle Royale/St. Esprit

   Havre du St-Esprti - Mathurin Picard - 1 femme - 5 pêcheurs - 1 chaloupe

3. ↑ A Note on Our Québec Ancestors by John Estano deRoche (1 July 2011)
4. ↑ Acadian Home The Company of Frenchmen in the County of Cumberland, Province of Nova Scotia, by Stephen White