♂Gaspard Boucher

Gaspard Boucher (about 1599 – 1663) was a joiner from Mortagne-au-Perche, in France, who went to New France in 1634 and was the father of Pierre Boucher^W, later governor of Trois-Rivières. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Madeleine Boucher (1634–1691).

Life

Gaspard Boucher was born about 1599 at Mortagne-au-Perche and was a menuisier, a joiner. His parents are not known from any record gathered for the family; the Fichier Origine, an index of the French origins of settlers in New France, names them as Jacques Boucher and Françoise Paigne, but the record behind that has not been examined.

On 12 December 1619 he married Nicole Lemaire at Notre-Dame of Mamers, in the Maine. Eight of their children were baptised at Mortagne between 1620 and 1634: Charles, Antoinette, Pierre, Nicolas, a second Charles, Marie, Marguerite and Madeleine. Pierre, baptised on 1 August 1622, was the son who became governor of Trois-Rivières.

Gaspard left for New France in 1634, the year his youngest child, Madeleine, was baptised; Nicole followed in 1636 with the younger children. A nineteenth-century history by Benjamin Sulte says that he farmed the Jesuits’ lands at Beauport jointly with Thomas Hayot until 11 June 1646. By November 1647 his daughter Madeleine, then thirteen, was contracted in marriage at Trois-Rivières to Urbain Baudry dit Lamarche.

Gaspard Boucher died at Trois-Rivières in 1663. The Fichier Origine repeats an account, credited to historians, that the family house burned with Gaspard and his wife Nicole inside it; that account rests on tradition, not on a register.

Notes

A family chart compiled in 1994 gives other dates: Gaspard’s death as 20 May 1662 and Nicole’s as 19 June 1652, both at Trois-Rivières, which would rule out their dying together; neither date has been checked against a register. The same chart places the 1619 marriage at Mortagne rather than Mamers. Sulte calls Gaspard a cousin of another settler, Marin Boucher, and gives his birthplace as Langy rather than Mortagne; the Fichier Origine’s Mortagne is followed here.