♀Madeleine Boucher

Madeleine Boucher (28 July 1634 – 13 September 1691) was one of the earliest settlers of Trois-Rivières in New France, a daughter of the Boucher family of the Perche whose marriage contract with the edge-tool maker Urbain Baudry dit Lamarche was signed when she was thirteen, and the sister of Pierre Boucher, later governor of Trois-Rivières. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Jeanne Baudry (1659–1700).

Early life

Madeleine was baptised at Notre-Dame of Mortagne-au-Perche, in France, on 28 July 1634, the youngest of eight children of Gaspard Boucher, a joiner, and Nicole Lemaire, who had married at Mamers in 1619. Her father sailed for New France in 1634; Madeleine followed in 1636 with her mother, at about two years old. Her brother Pierre, baptised there in 1622, rose to become governor of Trois-Rivières and founder of Boucherville.

Marriage and family

Her marriage contract with Urbain Baudry dit Lamarche, a taillandier from Luché in the Maine some nineteen years her senior, was drawn up at Trois-Rivières on 18 November 1647, when she was thirteen. The records do not explain the early match. Their first child, Marie, was baptised at Trois-Rivières in December 1650 with Pierre Boucher as godfather; two sons followed at Québec in 1653 and 1656, and the rest at Trois-Rivières, eleven children in all between 1650 and 1680. The census of about 1666 found the couple at Trois-Rivières with six children and a servant. At least five of the daughters married, one of them Jeanne, who in 1672 married the surgeon Jacques Dugue, also at thirteen.

Urbain died in August 1682 and was buried at Trois-Rivières, the register calling him a “bourgeois” of the town. Madeleine outlived him by nine years; she died on 13 September 1691 and was buried the next day at Trois-Rivières, a widow, her son Guillaume dit Des Buttes being named in the register as her eldest son.

Notes

A nineteenth-century genealogical dictionary gives her burial as 4 September, entered at Montréal on the 14th; the Trois-Rivières register records her death on the 13th and burial on the 14th. Her parents are said, in a compilation of French immigrant origins, to have died together when the family house at Trois-Rivières burned in 1663; that account rests on tradition, not on a register.