♂Guyon Turgis

Guyon Turgis (1542 – 1609) was a master mason and bourgeois of Paris^W who spent his working life in a two-room house in the parish of Saint-Eustache, while his eldest son married into a noble family and sailed for the New World. He was the eleventh great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Claude Saint-Étienne de La Tour (about 1570 – after 1636).

Life in Paris

Guyon Turgis was probably born in 1542, and about 1569 he married Marie Condor. In 1575 the couple bought a house in the rue Pagevin, in the parish of Saint-Eustache, from François Massé, a tailor, and they lived there for the rest of Guyon’s life. It had two rooms: a large chamber with a fireplace, furnished with five chairs, six stools, two chests, a two-door sideboard and a walnut bed hung with blue Beauvais serge, and a small room that served as the kitchen. In the cellar, beside the pulleys, hammers and other tools of the mason’s trade, stood a large cask of that year’s claret.

The couple had seven children, born between 1570 and 1589. The eldest, baptized Nicolas, later took the name Claude and, about 1592, married Marie de Salazar, a widow of noble family.

Death and estate

Guyon Turgis died in Paris on Sunday 5 April 1609. On 22 April an inventory of his goods was taken in the presence of his eldest son, who called himself Nicolas Turgis, sieur de La Tour, of Baigneux near Saint-Just in Champagne. The furniture and goods came to 208 livres tournois^W and 8 sols, the estate of a poor man. Marie declared that their son owed the household 64 livres “pour argent presté” (for money lent).

Among the papers in the house was a note signed by Marie de Salazar on 11 August 1601 for a debt of 76 livres owed to Guyon, and on its back was written that the money was for twelve écus handed to her husband before he left for Canada. The mason’s household papers are what date his son’s first voyage to the New World, soon after August 1601.

Notes

Sources

The account of the household, the inventory and the children is Léopold Lanctôt’s, in Familles acadiennes, tome II (1994), pp. 49-52, which quotes the inventory of 22 April 1609 found in the Archives de Paris by Robert Le Blant. George MacBeath’s biography of his son in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1, names the parents as “Guyon Turgis, mason, and Marie Condor”.

Dates

The years 1542 and 1609 in the opening line come from an online family tree (WikiTree) that cites no record. Lanctôt gives his birth as about 1540 and his death as Sunday 5 April 1609, from the inventory.

Where he came from

Lanctôt notes several men named Turgis, most of them masons, living in the rue Montorgueil in Paris in these years, among them a Christophe Turgis and a Jehan Turgis, journeyman mason, “natif de la ville d’Avranches”, and asks whether Guyon was of their family. His own origin is not known.

The name

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography spells his wife’s name Condor; Lanctôt and Stephen White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes give Condot.