♂Louis Guertin

Louis Guertin (baptised 3 January 1668; fl. 1690–1709) was a settler of New France who lived at Montréal in the 1690s and then on the Côte de Verchères, where his children were baptised at Contrecoeur. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Marie Guertin (1696 – 1766), a link that rests on inference from the parish registers rather than on any record naming him as her father.

Marriage and family

He and his wife, Madeleine Chicoine, first appear in the 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 between 1690 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. 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.

Notes

Marie Guertin, the wife of François Quintal of Boucherville, is taken to be one of his daughters because no other Guertin family in the indexed registers baptised a daughter Marie in the 1690s, and because two 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. No record states the parentage, and on that reading she is the daughter born on 17 July 1696.

He was baptised at Montréal on 3 January 1668, the son of Louis Guertin, called a “habitant” in the register, and Élisabeth Le Camus, written Camus there. A family compilation of 1994 gives his marriage on 6 August 1688 and his death at Verchères on 7 January 1733; neither has been checked against the registers.