♂Jean Hardy

Jean Hardy (baptized 5 July 1640 – buried 28 June 1715) was a Norman from Le Havre who came to New France in 1661 as a hired man of the Sulpician priests and settled on the land at Dombourg, west of Québec, where he and his wife Marie Poiré, one of the filles du roi, raised six children. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Pierre Hardy (born 1672).

Le Havre and the crossing

A compiled origin file of French emigrants to Québec records that he was born on 4 July 1640 and baptized the next day at Rouelles, a village now part of Le Havre, a son of Pierre Hardy and Isabelle Mehou. The same file has him crossing to New France in 1661 as an engagé^W of the Sulpicians^W, the order of priests at Montréal, under a contract dated 13 June 1661. Men hired this way bound themselves to work for a master in the colony for a fixed term, usually three years, in return for their passage and a wage. When he married eight years later, the register still entered him as of Saint-François, Havre-de-Grâce, the parish of Le Havre where the origin file places his father’s birth.

Dombourg and marriage

A marriage contract between a Jean Hardy and Catherine Rivet, one of the filles du roi^W, was drawn up before the notary Becquet and annulled on 21 December 1665. Yves Landry’s study of the filles du roi records the annulment, and the contract was probably this Jean Hardy’s, as he was the only man of that name at Québec then. Catherine went on to marry Pierre Duchesne dit Lapierre instead.

The census of 1666 lists him in the Comté de Québec, aged 20 as the record gives it, though his 1640 baptism would make him about 26. An inventory of the colony’s notarial records lists a grant of land from Jean Bourdon^W, seigneur of Dombourg, to a Jean Hardy on 20 March 1667, one of a run of grants Bourdon made that day; the deed itself is lost. It was most likely his, for Dombourg is where his family later lived.

An inventory of the colony’s marriage contracts, compiled by the archivist Pierre-Georges Roy^W, lists the contract of Jean Hardy and Marie Poiré, drawn up before the notary Pierre Duquet on 14 October 1669. A week later, on 21 October 1669, they married at Notre-Dame de Québec, with one of the three banns^W dispensed. The register entered the groom as of Saint-François, Havre-de-Grâce, in the archdiocese of Rouen, son of the late Pierre Hardy and of Isabelle Mehou (written Mihou), and the bride as of Saint-Laurent in Paris, daughter of the late Toussaint Poiré and Catherine Chatou. Marie had come out that year as one of the filles du roi, the young women whose passage the French crown paid so that the colony’s settlers could marry.

Family and death

They had six children, all baptized at Québec between 1670 and 1678: Anne Jeanne, Pierre, Jean Baptiste, Angelique, Catherine and Jean Francois. When Angelique and Jean Francois were baptized, in 1675 and 1678, the register gave the family’s home as Dombourg, the seigneurie west of Québec that became the parish of Pointe-aux-Trembles and is now Neuville. The census of 1681 lists Jean, aged 39, at Neuville, with these children: Marie, aged 12, Pierre, 8, Jean, 7, Catherine, 5, and a second Jean, aged 2.

Marie died first, and was buried at Pointe-aux-Trembles on 6 January 1715; Jean was buried there on 28 June 1715. Their sons Pierre and Jean Baptiste were present at both burials.

Notes

His year of birth is given three ways. The origin file’s 1640 baptism at Rouelles is followed here; Tanguay’s dictionary and a later study of Norman emigrants to Canada give 1642, and his burial entry gives his age as 70, which would put his birth about 1645. Tanguay and the study of Norman emigrants both place the 1669 marriage at Pointe-aux-Trembles, where the couple later lived; the marriage entry itself stands in the register of Notre-Dame de Québec. His mother’s surname is Mihou in the 1669 entry, Mehou in the origin file and Mehoux in Tanguay’s dictionary. Yves Landry’s study of the filles du roi records that he could not sign his name. The 1681 census calls the eldest daughter Marie, aged 12; she is probably the Anne Jeanne baptized in 1670.