♀Elisabeth Salée

Elisabeth Salée (born about 1651; buried 31 December 1722) was a woman of New France who raised a large family at Trois-Rivières, Québec and Neuville and was buried a widow at Cap-Santé, on the St. Lawrence above Québec. A compiled file of immigrants records that she came out from Paris in 1670 as a fille du roi^W, one of the young women the crown sent from France in the 1660s and early 1670s to marry the settlers of the colony. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Jacques Marcotte.

Origins

A compiled file of immigrants, the Fichier Origine, gives her origin as Paris and names her parents as Pierre Sallé, a master needle-maker, and Françoise Loupiat. The file gives her name as Isabelle or Élisabeth Salé and dates her arrival in New France to 1670, the year of her marriage contract. Her sister Marie and her brother Claude were still in Paris in 1682, when Marie’s marriage contract was drawn up there with Claude among the witnesses. A compiled genealogy (Macouin, no. 439) gives her parish as Saint-Médard in the faubourg Saint-Marcel, Paris. Another compiled account of the king’s daughters (Landry) says she arrived with goods valued at 200 livres and a gift of 100 livres from the king, and that she could not sign her name.

Life

According to the same file, Jacques Marcot and Elisabeth Salée signed their marriage contract at Trois-Rivières on 9 September 1670, before the notary Séverin Ameau. Their first son, Denis, was baptized at Trois-Rivières in 1671, and their son Jacques was baptized there on 28 January 1673. The children born between 1674 and 1678 were baptized at Québec, and by 1680 the family had moved upriver to Neuville, then usually called Pointe-aux-Trembles, where the children of the next ten years were all baptized. The census taken there about 1681 lists Jacques as a habitant^W aged 33, with Elisabeth, aged 30, and five children from Denis, aged eleven, down to Marie, aged two.

A son, Guillaume, was buried at Neuville on 7 January 1691, three weeks old. The records do not date the family’s move further up the river to Cap-Santé, but their daughter Marie married François Denevers there on 7 July 1698. Elisabeth stood godmother at Cap-Santé on 10 April 1707 to Marie Josephe Benoist, daughter of Pierre Benoist and Marie Dione, and on 1 April 1709 to her granddaughter Marie Anne Marcot, daughter of Jacques Marcot and Louise Baudet.

Elisabeth outlived her husband. She was buried at Cap-Santé on 31 December 1722, aged 67, as the widow of Jacques Marcot. Pierre Hardy and Mathurin Morisset witnessed the burial; the first was most likely the Cap-Santé militia captain of that name, whose daughter Charlotte married her son Henri thirteen months later.

Family

The registers record at least ten children born to the couple between 1671 and 1690, and an eleventh, Henri, is known from his marriage to Charlotte Hardy at Cap-Santé on 24 January 1724, which names Jacques Marcot and Elisabeth Salée as his parents and both as dead.

Their son Jacques is very probably the Jacques Marcotte who married Louise Baudet and raised his own family at Cap-Santé, though no record names him as their son. The ages agree: the couple’s Jacques was nine in the census of about 1681, and the Jacques Marcot buried at Cap-Santé on 21 March 1737 was 64, which points back to the baptism of 1673; no other Jacques Marcot of that age was baptized in the colony. Both households also belonged to the parish of Cap-Santé, where Henri married Charlotte Hardy in 1724 and Jacques and Louise’s son Jean Baptiste married her sister Marie Marguerite the next year.

Notes

The registers spell the surname Marcot and, once, Marquot; the family later wrote it Marcotte. Elisabeth’s surname appears as Sale, Salé, Salee and Salée; the census writes it Jalle, and her burial names her Isabelle.

Her age of 30 in the census places her birth about 1651; her age of 67 at burial would place it about 1655. The tree follows the census. The burial register enters her a second time further on, under the forename Marie.

The compiled file dates the wedding to 9 September 1670 on his entry and calls it a marriage contract on hers; no church entry of the wedding is given there. Cyprien Tanguay’s^W genealogical dictionary of French-Canadian families dates the household from 1671, the year of the first baptism, gives birth years of 1648 and 1651 that match the census ages, and names no place of origin for either of them. Tanguay lists Henri among the children of the younger Jacques and Louise Baudet; Henri’s own marriage record names Jacques Marcot and Elisabeth Salée as his parents.