♂Jacques Marcot

Jacques Marcot (baptized 7 October 1644; died before 17 March 1717) was a settler of New France whose family moved up the St. Lawrence by stages, from Trois-Rivières to Québec, to Neuville and finally to Cap-Santé. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Jacques Marcotte.

Origins

The parish register of Saint-Léger at Fécamp, in Normandy, records Jacques’s baptism there on 7 October 1644, a Friday, as the son of Charles Marcotte and Jacqueline Baucher. The same register records two older brothers baptized to the same parents: Robert on 9 July 1639 and François on 4 November 1640. A compiled file of immigrants, the Fichier Origine, traces him to the same parish and gives his father’s trade as master butcher (maître boucher), but dates the baptism to 10 October 1644. The file says he came out with a brother, Nicolas, and presumes that the two arrived in 1670. His wife, Elisabeth Salée, came from Paris that year as a fille du roi^W.

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. Jacques was still in the parish that December, when he witnessed a neighbor’s marriage there. 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. Jacques died before his wife: her burial at Cap-Santé on 31 December 1722 names her as his widow. A compiled file of immigrants gives his death as some time before 17 March 1717, with no place.

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.

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.

A family history written by a descendant gives the date 10 July 1644, not the 7 October of the register or the 10 October of the compiled file, and dates his coming to Canada to about 1667, with a brother Nicolas. Tanguay records a Nicolas Marcotte of Fécamp who married at Québec in 1670 but does not connect him with Jacques. The census of about 1681 gives Jacques’s age as 33, which would put his birth about 1648; against the baptism of 1644 that census age runs about four years low, and the tree follows the baptism.