♀Catherine Savoie

Catherine Savoie (born about 1661) was an Acadian woman of Port-Royal, a daughter of François Savoie and Catherine LeJeune and the wife of François Levron, with whom she raised at least nine children. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Magdeleine Levron.

Life

The census roll of 1671 lists her as “Catherinne aagée de neuf ans”, the fourth of the unmarried children of François Savoie, a farmer of fifty, and Catherine LeJeune, thirty-eight. By 1686 she was married to François Levron and had four children, the eldest, Jacques, aged nine. Her own age on that roll is given as twenty, which is too young to fit her other ages: thirty-four in 1693, thirty-eight in 1698 and forty-one in 1700 all point to a birth about 1660. Across those censuses she had at least nine children, among them Jacques, Magdelaine, Anne, Marie, Elisabeth, Jeanne, Jean Baptiste, Joseph and Pierre, the youngest born about 1696.

The 1703 roll lists her and her husband with four boys and four girls, and two men of the household able to bear arms. In 1707 the roll lists the couple as “Le bonhomme Nantois”, the old man Nantais, the family’s by-name, with two boys over fourteen and two under, and two girls over twelve and one under.

With the eldest son nine in 1686 and his mother’s own age so uncertain, it was possible that the first children were from an earlier marriage of François Levron. The parish register settles it. Five of the children’s marriages between 1703 and 1716, Jacques’s among them, name Catherine Savoie as the mother, so she bore Jacques at about sixteen. A history of the Acadians before 1755 adds that her daughter Anne later lived at Louisbourg^W, beside the family of Catherine’s sister Françoise Savoie; that rests on the published account alone.

Widowhood

Her husband was buried on 23 June 1714. The 1714 roll lists her as “La vœuve Nantois”, the widow Nantais, with two males and one female in her household. She was still living in January 1716, when her son Jean Baptiste married and only his father was described as deceased. The rolls list a Joseph, nine in 1700, in their household. He married Rose Véronneau at Boucherville, Quebec, on 13 September 1722, when he was about twenty-six; that act calls him a native of Acadia and gives his parents as the late Joseph Levron and Agnès Savoie, who was living. Neither parent’s forename matches François or Catherine, so the act does not settle that he was their son. No record of her death has been found in the surviving register.