♂Jean Meunier

Jean Meunier (born about 1651) was a settler of New France, the son of Mathurin Meunier and Françoise Fafard, who married Marguerite Housseau of Troyes at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in 1670 and raised a young family on the Île d’Orléans before the household vanished from the records of the colony after 1678. He was most likely the eighth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Marguerite Meunier (died by 1726).

Marriage

He was probably baptized at Trois-Rivières on 8 January 1651. His parents had married at Montréal in 1647, and by 1670 the family was living in the parish of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, downriver from Québec.

His bride came from the parish of Saint-Jean at Troyes, in Champagne, where her mother still lived; her father was dead. She is counted among the filles du roi^W, the young women the French crown sent out to marry the settlers of the colony, and she had arrived that year. Their marriage contract is listed among the acts of the Québec notary Romain Becquet^W under 31 August 1670, and they were married at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré on 5 October 1670. She was about ten years older than he.

The couple settled at Saint-Laurent on the Île d’Orléans. Four children, Jean, Anne, Paul and Charles, were baptized at Sainte-Famille on the island between 1672 and 1678.

Leaving Canada

After Charles’s baptism in 1678, neither Jean nor Marguerite appears again in the records of Canada: they are missing from the census of 1681, and no burial is recorded there for either of them. The family seems to have left the colony about 1678, most likely for Acadia, where a Marguerite Meunier, held to be their daughter, married François Michel about 1695. The line descends through her.

Notes

His birth

Yves Landry’s study of the filles du roi gives his baptism as 8 January 1651, and Cyprien Tanguay’s dictionary of Canadian families lists him among the children of Mathurin Meunier and Françoise Fafard with a baptism on 8 January at Trois-Rivières. The act itself does not appear in the published index of the colony’s registers. The marriage register writes the surname Meusnier.

The marriage

The church act of 5 October 1670 names him as the son of Mathurin Meusnier and Françoise Fafard, and his bride as the daughter of the late Nicolas Housseau and of Marguerite “de Troye”, that is, of Troyes. The contract of 31 August 1670 before Becquet is listed in Pierre-Georges Roy’s inventory of the marriage contracts of the French régime and in Landry, who adds that neither of them could sign and counts four children, the household settled at Saint-Laurent. The four baptisms at Sainte-Famille, Île d’Orléans, are known from the index of that parish’s register. Landry’s dates make her about ten years the elder: she was baptized in 1641.

Where they went

Landry records Marguerite Housseau as having left the colony about 1678. Where the family went is not stated in any record of Canada; Acadia is inferred from their daughter’s marriage there.

Their daughter Marguerite

No daughter named Marguerite appears among the couple’s four baptisms in Canada, so a daughter of that name would have been born after they left. Her place as their daughter rests on Stephen A. White’s dictionary of Acadian families, the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, as it is quoted in online family trees. No Meunier household appears on the Acadian censuses of 1686, 1693, 1701, 1707 or 1714. Bona Arsenault’s genealogy names other Meunier women at Port-Royal in the same generation without naming their father. Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes calls François Michel’s second wife, married in 1695, “Marguerite Mignier (ou Meunier)”.