♂Jean Joffrion

Jean Joffrion (about 1671 – 1740) was a settler in New France who signed on in 1695 as a hired man for the fur-trade country of the West, and later made his home at Cap-Saint-Michel in the parish of Varennes, below Montréal. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Joseph Joffrion (born 1708).

Early life

He was the second of the nine children of Pierre Joffrion and Marie Briau, who had married around 1669 and settled on a concession in the seigneury^W of Verchères, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence. The census of 1681 found him there, aged nine, with his parents, his elder brother André and four younger brothers and sisters. The ages given for him in 1681, 1684 and 1698 point to a birth between about 1670 and 1672; no record of his baptism is known. In the dictionaries of Québec families the name is filed as Geoffrion, and a history of Varennes heads the family “Joffrion dit Saint-Jean”.

A family history drawn from the notarial records says that by the mid-1680s the family had moved back to Montréal, and that on 27 October 1684 his mother, carrying a note of authority in his father’s own hand, placed him as a servant for two years with Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil^W and his wife Catherine Primot, at 40 livres a year. Le Moyne was one of the leading men of the colony; his sons Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville^W and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville^W later founded French Louisiana, where Jean’s own son would settle.

The West

On 4 April 1695 he was engaged for the West, as his brother André had been in 1691. An engagement^W of this kind was a notarial hiring contract under which a young man bound himself to paddle and carry for a merchant’s canoes traveling to the fur-trade posts of the upper country^W, beyond Montréal on the Great Lakes. The records do not say where he went or how long he stayed, but he was back on the St. Lawrence within three years.

Marriage and family

On 17 April 1698 he married Catherine Milot dit Laval in the parish of Varennes, the ceremony taking place at Cap-Saint-Michel. He was about 28. She was about 32, the daughter of Jacques Milot dit Laval and Jeanne Hebert, and the widow of Jacques Mongeau, whom she had married at Montréal in 1685 and by whom she had had six children, born between 1686 and 1696. The couple made their home at Cap-Saint-Michel, where their first child was born that November.

Jean and Catherine had five children between 1698 and 1708: Catherine, who married Pierre Taillefer at Rivière-des-Prairies in 1720; Marie-Marguerite, who married Pierre Masson in 1721 and died the following year; Jean-Baptiste, who died at fifteen in April 1719 and was buried at Pointe-aux-Trembles; Claude, who lived a month; and Joseph, born and baptized at Varennes on 18 March 1708. Catherine died on 10 October 1708, seven months after Joseph’s birth, and was buried at Varennes the next day.

On 19 March 1709, five months after her death, he married Marie-Charlotte François at Varennes. She was the daughter of Pierre François and Madeleine Gaumond, born at La Canardière near Québec on 1 July 1677, and had a son, François, baptized at Boucherville in 1707, whose father is not named. Jean and Marie-Charlotte had seven children between 1709 and 1720, in the parish of Varennes. Four of them died young: Marie-Charlotte at three, Claude a few days after his birth, an unnamed infant on the day it was born, and Marguerite, who died at Cap-Saint-Michel in January 1724 aged three. Twin sons, Pierre and Joseph, were born in August 1715, and a son Gabriel in February 1717; what became of them has not been traced.

Marie-Charlotte died before him and was buried at Varennes on 27 April 1731. His son Joseph, the youngest child of the first marriage, married at Varennes in 1728 and later went south to Pointe Coupée in French Louisiana.

Jean died at Varennes after a long illness and was buried in the parish cemetery there on 8 January 1740. The curé recorded that he had received all the sacraments, and two neighbors, Michel and Pierre Petit, stood as witnesses.

Notes

The burial entry gives his age as about seventy-six, which would place his birth around 1664. His age of nine in the 1681 census and of twenty-eight at his first marriage point instead to about 1671, the year Tanguay gives; ages at death were often overstated for the old. No baptism for him has been found in the indexed registers. He is identified in the 1740 entry as the same man because a Jean Joffrion, widower of Catherine Milot, remarried at Varennes in 1709, and the wife of a Jean Joffrion was buried there in 1731 with Michel Petit again as a witness.

Tanguay’s^W dictionary lists a son Joseph, born in 1705 and buried at Pointe-aux-Trembles in April 1719, and credits the son Jean-Baptiste with a marriage to Marie Grandpierre. Jetté’s later dictionary, compiled from the registers, has no Joseph born in 1705 and gives that April 1719 burial to Jean-Baptiste, which makes the two one boy and Joseph of 1708 the only son of that name in the first family.