♀Jeanne Rousselière

Jeanne Rousselière (born about 1637) was a young woman from Saintonge who crossed to Montreal with the recruits of 1653, married the carpenter Pierre Godin there, and went with him to Acadia in 1676. She was probably the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Gabriel Godin (1661–1730).

Early life and the crossing

Jeanne was a daughter of Louis Rousselière and Isabelle Paris, of the town of Saintes, in Saintonge^W. In 1653, aged about seventeen, she sailed for Montreal with the men raised in France that year by Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve^W to reinforce the settlement. She was one of some fifteen young women on a crossing that also carried Maisonneuve himself and Marguerite Bourgeoys^W. Five of them married in the year they landed; Jeanne was one of the ten who married the following year.

Marriage

At Montreal she married Pierre Godin dit Châtillon, a journeyman carpenter from Châtillon-sur-Seine who had come out with the same recruits. The marriage contract was signed before the notary Lambert Closse on 27 September 1654, and the wedding followed at Notre-Dame, by most accounts on 13 October 1654. In November 1655 Pierre bought a house from André Dumets with an arpent of land.

The couple had nine children, by the compiled genealogies, born between 1655 and 1672. Their eldest son, Laurent, born in 1655, is said to have had Maisonneuve himself, the founder and governor of Montreal, for his godfather. About 1665 the family moved to the Québec region; the census of 1666 found them there, Pierre aged 34 and Jeanne 30, with five children. In September 1666 Pierre gave his wife power of attorney and went back to Montreal, and the family was together there again by October 1669, when another child was born.

Sault Saint-Louis

By 1672 the family lived at the Sault Saint-Louis, by the rapids above Montreal. That August a neighbor, Pierre Boutaux dit La Ramée, a former soldier, complained to the island’s judge, Charles d’Ailleboust, that Pierre and his son Laurent had beaten him with sticks of green wood as thick as an ax handle, and that Laurent had pushed a blade fixed to a pole through the gaps in the stakes of his cabin, calling on his father to kill the scoundrel and throw him in the river. La Ramée said that Jeanne had brought the blade, in a rage, and urged her son on. The quarrel had begun over the Godin children, whom La Ramée accused of taking his corn and his bread. Pierre, aged 40, Jeanne, 38, and Laurent, 17, all denied it under oath, and their son Gabriel, nine or ten, said he had spent the whole day on the lake.

Jeanne’s own account was quieter. On St. Lawrence’s day her daughter had told La Ramée that her parents did not want him coming to the house; on the Saturday he had waited for them on the road as they came home from a day’s work for a man named La Flotte, and accused their daughter of taking his bread and corn. On the Sunday, coming back from Mass at Lachine at about four in the afternoon, the children were shouting at the starlings in the corn, and La Ramée and her husband had words without coming near each other. She declared that she could not sign her name. On 30 August the clerk, standing in for the absent prosecutor, wrote that the charge stood unpunished for want of proof, and asked for more witnesses to be heard.

Acadia

After more than twenty years at Montreal, Pierre and Jeanne sold all they owned in June 1676 and took the family to Acadia, to the Saint John River. Two of their daughters had married at Montreal before they left. Pierre died before the census of 1686, which found Jeanne at Port-Royal, a widow of 60, with three of the children, Gabriel aged 25, Pierre 20 and Anne 13, and no property at all.

About 1688 she is said to have married again, to Pierre Martin of Port-Royal, a widower born about 1626, the son of Pierre Martin and Catherine Vigneau. Her daughter Anne had married his son Pierre about two years before, so that mother and daughter were the wives of father and son. Jeanne and Pierre Martin had no children together, and she was still his wife at the census of 1701. Where and when she died is not known.

The family

Their eldest son, Laurent Godin dit Châtillon (born 1655), went to Acadia with the family and is said to have settled with his wife at Pointe Beauséjour, near Beaubassin^W, taking the name sieur de Beauséjour from that land, where Fort Beauséjour^W was built half a century later. In his last years he went back to the island of Montreal, where he married again at Pointe-Claire on 26 June 1719 and worked as a miller; he was buried at Rivière-des-Prairies on 1 May 1737.

Notes

Sources for her life

Her parents and her marriage are from the Fichier Origine, a database of the European origins of the settlers of New France, and from Roland-J. Auger’s La grande recrue de 1653 (pp. 69-70), which cites the marriage contract before Lambert Closse. Auger’s list of the passengers of 1653 (pp. 26-27) names her among the young women of the crossing; his note there, after the historian Archange Godbout, counts fifteen of them, five married the year they landed and ten the year after. The census of 1666, the power of attorney, the sale of 1676 and the census of 1686 are from Auger’s pp. 69-70, the last from the returns printed by Benjamin Sulte. The court papers of August 1672, with her two statements, are printed in full by Auger (pp. 128-133); the judge was Charles d’Ailleboust, sieur des Muceaux, bailiff of the island of Montreal.

The nine children and Laurent’s godfather are from Bona Arsenault’s Histoire et généalogie des Acadiens (vol. 4, pp. 1632-1634), which also gives Laurent’s later life. Her second marriage, about 1688, and her place as Pierre Martin’s wife at the census of 1701 are from Arsenault (vol. 2, pp. 673-674, and vol. 4, p. 1633), who also marries Anne Godin to Pierre Martin the younger about 1686. The Martin family history on the Acadians in Gray website gives the same two marriages, places the second at Port-Royal in the late 1680s or early 1690s, and states that it was childless.

Her name, home and age

Auger’s passenger list writes her Jeanne Rousillier, aged 17, from Maëze near Brouage, and his note writes her mother Isabelle Panis; the marriage contract makes the family of the town of Saintes (“Xaintes”). Auger’s note also says she married at 19. Her ages in the records, 17 in 1653, 30 in 1666 and 38 in 1672, point to a birth about 1635, a little earlier than the year 1637 given on WikiTree; the census of 1686, which makes her 60, is out of line with all of them.

The wedding date

Auger gives the wedding as 13 October 1654 in his entry for Pierre Godin, but 3 October 1654 in his note on Jeanne; the Fichier Origine has 13 October.

Her death

Auger knew nothing of her after 1686. WikiTree gives her death as 1714 on her own profile and as about 1695 on her first husband’s, citing no record for either.

The line of descent

The descent from Gabriel Godin runs through Jean-Baptiste Godin dit Lincour, whom Stephen A. White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes places in Gabriel’s family; Arsenault’s list of Gabriel’s children does not name him. The line to Floyd Amatus Delahorne is therefore probable rather than proved.