♀Adrienne Du Vivier

Adrienne Du Vivier (born 1626 – died 20 October 1706) was a Picardy saddler’s daughter who crossed to New France as a young wife and mother, was widowed within the colony’s first years, and remarried there. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Jeanne Hebert (1647–1687).

Early life

Adrienne Du Vivier was born about 1626, the daughter of Antoine Du Vivier, a saddler of Corbeny in Picardy (in what is now the Aisne department), and Catherine Journa. The Fichier Origine gives Corbeny as her place of origin; the 1646 contract names it as her father’s town, and Antoine is described in it as already deceased.

Marriage and family

On 13 January 1646, in Paris, Adrienne signed a marriage contract, before the notary Étienne Poisant, with Augustin Hébert, a tailor of that city; her sister Antoinette assisted her at the signing. Their daughter Jeanne was baptized in Paris in 1647, at the parish of Saint-Barthélemy. The family then crossed to New France with their infant daughter, and Adrienne bore at least four more children in the colony, the last, Madeleine-Louise, in 1653, the year her husband died.

Widowed with several young children, Adrienne remarried. On 19 November 1654 she married Robert Le Cavelier dit Deslauriers, of Cherbourg, at Notre-Dame de Montréal. The register names her as the daughter of Antoine Du Vivier and Catherine Journa and as the widow of Augustin Hébert. The governor, Paul de Chomedey^W, and Lambert Closse^W were among the witnesses. A marriage contract had been drawn up on 30 October 1654 before Lambert Closse; in it Robert, then 28 and an armourer from Normandy, signed his name, while Adrienne could not sign.

Her daughter’s marriage

At her daughter Jeanne’s marriage at Montréal in March 1660, the register described Jeanne as the daughter of “the late Augustin Hébert” and of Adrienne. The witnesses were a surgeon named Dubois, recorded as a friend of Adrienne, and Lambert Closse, the sergeant-major of the Montréal garrison, who stood as the thirteen-year-old bride’s legal guardian. A fatherless minor needed a guardian to marry. The records do not say why the sergeant-major took the role rather than her stepfather.

Later years and death

Robert had died by June 1700. On 11 June that year, as Robert’s widow, Adrienne bound herself by an obligation to M. de Couagne. On 17 October 1700, still as his widow, she made a codicil before the Montréal notary Antoine Adhémar.

Adrienne Du Vivier died at Montréal on 20 October 1706. She was buried at Notre-Dame de Montréal on 26 October 1706, and the burial act calls her the widow of the late Robert Le Cavelier.

Notes

Family-tree compilations elsewhere give Adrienne a marriage in 1615, eleven years before her own recorded birth, and a death in France; those figures contradict each other and have not been used here.

The 1654 marriage and the 1706 burial are from the Notre-Dame de Montréal registers as copied in the Drouin collection. The 1654 contract’s ages, trade and signatures are from Trudel, Montréal 1642–1663 (1976), p. 273. The June 1700 obligation and the October 1700 codicil are from Roy, Inventaire des greffes des notaires du régime français, volume 6. The date of death, 20 October 1706, is the Fichier Origine’s; the burial act does not give one.