♂Félix Dufresne

Félix Dufresne (about 1633 – 27 July 1683), whose family name was Tune, with Dufresne as a by-name, was a surgeon in the colony of New France, settled at Batiscan on the St. Lawrence between Québec and Trois-Rivières. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Madeleine Dufresne (1676).

Life

Tanguay’s genealogical dictionary names him Pierre-Félix Dufresne, “chirurgien, établi à Batiscan”, with his wife Elizabeth Lefebvre, and lists him among the early surgeons of the colony under the year 1666. The surgeons of New France, trained by apprenticeship rather than at a university, set bones, bled patients and dressed wounds. The index of the Québec parish and notarial records gives his name as Félix Tune dit Dufresne: it shows a marriage contract in 1665, on which a Marin Tune also appears as his father; the census of 1667 at Trois-Rivières, aged thirty-four; his presence as a witness at the marriage of a Jacques Lefebvre there on 11 November 1670; and the census of 1681 at Batiscan, aged fifty, with three young children, Marie, Marguerite and Antoine, in the household.

His children married along the river and at Montréal: a daughter Elisabeth at Champlain in 1682, when she was sixteen; Madeleine at Champlain in 1690 and again at Montréal in 1698; Catherine at Lachine in 1700; Marguerite at Montréal in 1703; and Antoine at Montréal in 1713. Félix Tune died and was buried at Batiscan on 27 July 1683, aged forty-nine; the page of the register is torn. His widow, Elisabeth Lefebvre, married Jean Colet at Batiscan on 13 January 1687, and the act names her as the widow of Félix Tune. When their daughter Madeleine married at Montréal in 1698, both of her parents were recorded as dead.

Notes

These details come from the indexes of the parish registers and from Tanguay; the register pages themselves have not been read. His origin in France has not been found.