♀Madeleine Chicoine

Madeleine Chicoine (1672 – 14 May 1745) was a woman of New France, the daughter of Pierre Chicoine and Madeleine Chrétien of Longueuil and the wife of Louis Guertin, who raised a large family at Montréal in the 1690s and then on the Côte de Verchères, where her later children were baptised at Contrecoeur; three of her daughters were baptised Marie. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Marie Guertin (1696 – 1766), a link that rests on inference from the parish registers rather than on any record naming her as Marie’s mother.

She first appears in the registers at Montréal on 1 December 1690, at the baptism of her 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 the couple’s children between 1690 and 1709, and the names repeat: two daughters baptised Marie Madeleine, in 1690 and 1709, two sons baptised Louis, in 1698 and 1705, and three daughters baptised Marie, in January 1694, July 1696 and 1701. The records do not explain why the names were given again; 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. Marie Guertin, the wife of François Quintal of Boucherville, is taken to be the daughter born on 17 July 1696, because no other Guertin family in the indexed registers baptised a daughter Marie in the 1690s and because two ties join the families: Marie Anne Guertin was godmother to Marie’s daughter Marie-Anne Quintal in 1720, and Madeleine’s 1727 marriage was into the Quintal family of Boucherville.

Parents, birth and death

Marie Madeleine Chicoine was baptised at Montréal on 11 March 1672, the daughter of Pierre Chicoine and Madeleine Chrestien, who were living at Longueuil. Her parents had married at Montréal on 20 October 1670. She died at Verchères on 14 May 1745 and was buried in the church there the next day. The burial register calls her “Marie Magdeleine Chichoine veuve de defunt Louis Guertin, fille de défunt Pierre Chichoine” and gives her age as 78, though her baptism makes her 73. That burial record is what joins Louis Guertin’s wife of the 1690s registers to the child baptised in 1672. A family compilation of 1994 gives the same parents and dates, and the registers now bear it out.