♀Jeanne Motin

Jeanne Motin (about 1615 – about 1666) was a French-born settler of Acadia and the wife, in turn, of two of its governors. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Anne Saint-Étienne de La Tour (1661–1738).

Coming to Acadia

She was born in France about 1615, the daughter of Louis Motin and Marie de Salins. Her father was associated with the Razilly-Condonnier trading company. By one account, Isaac de Razilly^W had asked her brother-in-law, Nicolas Le Creux, sieur du Breuil, to find a wife in France for his lieutenant, Charles de Menou d’Aulnay^W, and Le Creux brought back his own wife’s sister after Louis Motin gave his consent.

In 1636 she sailed from La Rochelle on the Saint-Jean, one of five ships sent to Acadia that spring. The ship’s roll lists Nicolas Le Creux and his wife, Anne Motin, at the head of their party, then “Claude Motin, leur frère”, “Jean Motin, aussi frère” and “Jeanne Motin, leur sœur”, with a cousin and a maidservant. She married Charles de Menou d’Aulnay that same year, probably soon after the voyage.

With d’Aulnay she had eight children, four sons who entered the army and died in battle and four daughters who all took religious vows. Their daughter Marie was baptized at Port-Royal on 21 September 1639.

Widowhood

D’Aulnay died in 1650, and she stayed on at Port-Royal to face an estate with debts of well over 300,000 livres, a sum she had little hope of raising. Its creditors pressed her hard, and the men of Emmanuel Le Borgne^W raided and looted her property. She sent one of her officers to drive Nicolas Denys^W and his brother Simon from their posts on Cape Breton, which she claimed as lands of the estate. In July 1651 she sent her steward, Brice de Sainte-Croix, to France to act for her, but the bargain he struck with the Duc de Vendôme, half the debts in exchange for half the property and a share of the fur trade, only made matters worse.

Marriage to La Tour

In 1653 Charles Saint-Étienne de La Tour came to Port-Royal and presented her with a royal order restoring to him Fort Sainte-Marie, at the mouth of the Saint John River, which d’Aulnay had taken from him in 1645. Both were heavily in debt and anxious to end the ruinous rivalry of the two factions, and in 1653, at Port-Royal, Jeanne Motin married Charles Saint-Étienne de La Tour, the chief rival of her late husband. They lived at the mouth of the Saint John River until about 1656, then moved to Cap de Sable.

The couple had five children: Jacques, Charles, Marie, Marguerite and Anne. Jeanne is thought to have died at Cap de Sable about 1666; a petition of her daughter Marie, dated 1667, shows that she was dead by then.

The family

According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, their son Charles, born at Cap de Sable between 1663 and 1668, was a fur trader and soldier who in 1696 pleaded his brothers’ and sisters’ claim to the rights in Acadia they had inherited from their parents, a claim largely granted by a decree of the Conseil d’État in 1703. He was severely wounded in the defense of Port-Royal in 1710, received the cross of the Order of Saint Louis^W in 1728, and died a captain in the garrison at Louisbourg in 1731.

Notes

Sources

Her birth about 1615 in France, her parents (the Dictionary names her father Louis Motin de Corcelles, or Courcelles), her two marriages, her widowhood and her death about 1666 at Cap de Sable come from George MacBeath’s biography of her in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1, a compiled history. The account of Le Creux finding d’Aulnay a wife is from a translated family study in the Attakapas Gazette, vol. 23 (1988), pp. 158–159, which also places Louis Motin at Mont-Saint-Vincent, in the Charolais in southern Burgundy, as controller of the royal salt works.

The voyage of 1636

The roll of the Saint-Jean, which left La Rochelle on 1 April 1636, was printed by Archange Godbout in the Mémoires de la Société généalogique canadienne-française, vol. 1 (1944), pp. 22–24, and transcribed again by Guy Perron in 2022. It names only one sister, Anne, and a cousin, Jacqueline de Glaisnée; the Dictionary says she came “with her two sisters”.

Her first marriage

The Dictionary places her marriage to d’Aulnay in 1636, “probably at Port-Royal”. The Attakapas Gazette study places it at La Hève shortly after the ship arrived, with the Capuchin fathers presiding, and says the rest of the Motin party then went back to France. The baptism of her daughter Marie on 21 September 1639 is quoted from an extract of the Port-Royal register in Lanctot’s Familles acadiennes, vol. 1, p. 68.

The date of the second marriage

The Dictionary’s entry for her gives the marriage to La Tour as 24 February 1653; its entry for La Tour gives only 1653, at Port-Royal, and has him sailing there in the summer of that year.