♂Antoine Emery dit Coderre

Antoine Emery dit Coderre (died about 1713) was a soldier of the Carignan-Salières Regiment who stayed in Canada and became a habitant of Contrecoeur, in the Montreal district of New France, who held land there and fathered twenty-one children by two wives, whose two families afterwards divided his land between them by drawing lots. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Francois Emery dit Codere (1700–1755).

Early life

Antoine was baptized on 6 August 1643 at Sarrazac, in the old province of Périgord^W in south-western France, the son of Mégny Emery and Marguerite Pasquau; the register enters him as Thony Eymery. He came to Canada as a soldier of the Carignan-Salières Regiment^W, which the French crown sent to New France in 1665 to put an end to the Iroquois raids. The regiment’s roll lists him as “Antoine Emery, Sieur de Coderre” in the company of Contrecoeur, the same company as Pierre Favreau, whose daughter later became his second wife. When the regiment was sent home in 1668 he was one of the men who chose to stay, and his first wife, Marie Devault, was one of the filles du roi, the women the king sent out to marry the colony’s settlers. His story is also told in Les Filles du Roi and the Carignan Regiment.

He held two thirty-arpent grants of land at Contrecoeur, made to him on 25 July 1677, and received a further tract there by a donation from the Lacroix dit Langoumois family the following year. He could not write: in January 1687 he served as a witness at a marriage at Contrecoeur, and the register notes that he was unable to sign his own name, as he was again unable to do in his own family’s court proceedings after his death.

Marriage and family

Antoine married first Marie Devault, known in different records as Devault, Deveaux and Daneau, by a marriage contract that Yves Landry’s catalogue of the filles du roi dates 13 April 1674, before the notary Adhémar; a recital of the contract in the estate papers of 1715 gives the day as 18 April, and its year is not clearly legible. She had died by 1688. The couple had eleven children, born between about 1671 and the mid-1680s; two of their daughters, Madeleine and Francoise, married at Boucherville in January 1700, with Antoine present at both ceremonies.

He married second, by a contract passed before the notary Michel Moreau on 5 June 1688, Marie Anne Favreau dit Deslauriers, daughter of Pierre Favreau and Marie Benoit of Contrecoeur; she outlived him and died before 19 July 1737. A margin note added to the parish register decades later places the contract at Contrecoeur, though Moreau practiced as a notary at Boucherville, and no sacramental record of the marriage itself has survived in either place. Antoine and Marie Anne had ten children, born between 1690 and 1711, among them Francois Emery dit Coderre (1700–1755), through whom the family’s line continues.

Death

Antoine was still active on 23 January 1713, when he served as an arbitrator in a succession dispute at Contrecoeur; that is the last record of him alive. His widow’s petition to the court, filed on 5 April 1715 asking that a guardian be named for her ten minor children, states that he “had died two years before,” placing his death about 1713. The court later divided his land between the children of his two marriages by lot, the usual way under the Custom of Paris to share an estate fairly among heirs when the parcels could not be made exactly equal, confirming the division on 27 September 1715 and continuing the accounting into the following year; Marie Anne kept a life interest in half the property as her widow’s portion, as her marriage contract had provided.

Notes

A nineteenth-century cemetery marker gives birth and death dates of 16 August 1643 and 16 February 1715 (a second version of the same marker gives 6 August 1643 and 10 February 1716). The baptism at Sarrazac bears out the 6 August, but the death dates conflict with his widow’s own account of when he died and have not been used here. The one surviving court record that names his heir’s parentage in full gives the mother’s name but only the surname “Coder” for the father, so the forename Antoine rests on the titles of the guardianship and estate records rather than on that act itself.