♀Catherine Milot dit Laval

Catherine Milot dit Laval (June 1665 – 10 October 1708) was a Montréal-born woman of New France who bore eleven children to two husbands and died seven months after the birth of her last child; she was buried at Varennes. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Joseph Joffrion (born 1708).

Early life

She was baptized at Notre-Dame de Montréal on 2 June 1665, the second of the ten children of Jacques Milot dit Laval and Jeanne Hebert, who had married there in 1660. The baptism does not give the day of her birth. The family name was written many ways by the clerks of the colony (Milot, Millot, Milheau, Milhau), and “dit Laval” was the by-name her father carried and passed to his children. Her mother was buried at Montréal on 25 March 1687, when Catherine was twenty-one and already a mother herself.

The colony’s censuses, as transcribed by the historian Benjamin Sulte^W in his Histoire des Canadiens-français (1882), place her in her parents’ household each time. In 1666, at Montréal, she was eight months old. In 1667, on the Île de Montréal, she was two, and the household had one head of cattle and 25 arpents^W under cultivation. In 1681, in the town of Montréal, she was seventeen, with her brothers Jacques and Ignace and her sisters Marie and Jeanne; the household then had four horned cattle and 18 arpents under cultivation.

First marriage

On 1 March 1685, at Montréal, she married Jacques Mongeau, a son of Pierre-Jacques Mongeau and Louise DuBois, who had come to Canada from the parish of Notre-Dame de Cogne in the diocese of La Rochelle. A marriage contract had been signed before the Montréal notary Pierre Cabazie the day before, on 28 February, the usual order in New France. Roy’s printed inventory of notarial records abstracts that contract and gives the groom as of Cap de la Trinité. Cabazie also witnessed the church wedding. She was nineteen.

The couple had six sons in ten years, born between January 1686 and January 1696; the second was baptized at Boucherville. Two of them, Jacques-Hilaire and Jean-Pierre, share the birth date 20 February 1693 in Tanguay’s dictionary^W of Québec families, which makes them twins. At least four of the six grew up to marry, one of them, Jean-Baptiste, at Varennes in 1718, and the youngest, Christophe, lived until 1762. Jacques Mongeau died between the birth of that youngest son in January 1696 and the spring of 1698, when the records call Catherine his widow; the date and place of his death have not been found.

Second marriage

On 17 April 1698 she married Jean Joffrion in the parish of Varennes, the ceremony taking place at Cap-Saint-Michel. A published account noting that one Jean Brodeur attended describes the wedding as that of Jean Joffrion, son of Pierre Joffrion and Marie Briau, to “Catherine Milot, dit Laval, widow of Jacques Monjeau”. She was about thirty-two and he about twenty-eight, a man whom Jetté’s dictionary lists as an engagé for the West, hired on 4 April 1695. The same dictionary gives their first child, a daughter named Catherine, as born at Cap-Saint-Michel in November 1698 and baptized at Varennes on 16 November.

Jean and Catherine had five children between 1698 and 1708: Catherine, Marie-Marguerite, Jean-Baptiste, Claude, who lived only a month, and Joseph, born and baptized at Varennes on 18 March 1708. A Christophe Mongeau, who could not sign his name, was a witness at Joseph’s wedding at Varennes in 1728, though the register does not say whether he was the half-brother of that name.

Death

Jetté’s dictionary, a compiled work, gives Catherine’s death as 10 October 1708, seven months after Joseph’s birth, and her burial at Varennes the next day. She was about forty-three. Her widower married Marie-Charlotte François at Varennes in March 1709. Joseph, her youngest child, later went south to Pointe Coupée in French Louisiana, where the line continued.

Notes

Tanguay gives her birth only as June 1665; a birth date of 12 June 1665 that circulated earlier has no record behind it, and the one dated act is the baptism of 2 June. An online family tree places her death at Verchères rather than Varennes; the burial at Varennes, as Jetté gives it, is followed here. Online memorials and trees index her under her married name, Geoffrion. The 1681 return gives her age as seventeen, where her June 1665 baptism makes her fifteen or sixteen at that date; the ages in that return run high for other children of the household too. The dictionary dates the Boucherville twins Jean-Pierre and Jacques-Hilaire to 20 February 1693, but a parish index gives their birth as 16 February, with the baptism on the 20th.