♂Louis Guertin

Louis Guertin (baptized 3 January 1668 – 7 January 1733) was a settler of New France who lived at Montréal in the 1690s and then on the Côte de Verchères, where his children were baptized at Contrecoeur and where he died. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Marie Guertin (1696 – 1766), whose marriage contract of 1712 names him as her father.

Marriage and family

On 6 August 1688 he and Madeleine Chicoine made their marriage contract before the Montréal notary Claude Maugue, whose file docket reads “accord de mariage entre Louis Guertin et Magdeleine Chicoine”; the church record of the wedding itself has not been found. The couple first appear in the parish registers at Montréal on 1 December 1690, at the baptism of their daughter Marie Madeleine. The family stayed at Montréal until about 1698 and was at Contrecoeur by 1701. The indexed registers record the baptisms of eight of their children, five at Montréal between 1690 and 1698 and three at Contrecoeur between 1701 and 1709, among them three daughters baptised Marie, in January 1694, in July 1696 and in 1701. The records do not explain the repetition; the first Marie, born on 24 January 1694, was buried at Montréal on 9 January 1695, aged eleven months. Tanguay’s dictionary records that their elder son Louis, born on 25 March 1698, was killed by a horse and buried at Contrecoeur on 13 July 1704, when he was six. Marguerite married Michel Langevin at Verchères on 23 April 1714. Seven of the couple’s daughters married between 1714 and 1731, among them Marie Anne, who married François Pinault on 7 January 1721, and Madeleine, who married Michel Quintal of Boucherville, a son of François Quintal, on 7 January 1727.

He died at Verchères on 7 January 1733 and was buried there the next day. The parish priest recorded him as about sixty-seven years old; François Chagnon and Pierre Pinault attended the burial. Madeleine outlived him by twelve years and was buried at Verchères in May 1745.

Notes

Marie Guertin, the wife of François Quintal of Boucherville, was his daughter: her marriage contract of 21 November 1712 names her parents as Louis Guertin of Verchères and Madeleine Chicoine. Two other ties join the families: his daughter Marie Anne Guertin was godmother to Marie’s daughter Marie-Anne Quintal in 1720, and his daughter Madeleine married into the Quintal family of Boucherville in 1727. Of his two daughters named Marie, the elder died in infancy, so she is the daughter born on 17 July 1696.

He was baptized at Montréal on 3 January 1668, the son of Louis Guertin, called a “habitant” in the register, and Élisabeth Le Camus, written Camus there. His burial register calls him about sixty-seven in January 1733, which would put his birth around 1666; the baptism of 1668 is the more precise record.