♀Madeleine Chrétien

Madeleine Chrétien was a woman of Paris, from the parish of Saint-Eustache^W, who married Pierre Chicoine, a settler of Longueuil, at Montréal in New France on 20 October 1670; the wedding was witnessed by Charles Le Moyne^W, son of the seigneur of Longueuil, Charles Le Moyne^W. PRDH’s list of the Filles du Roi^W, the women who came to New France between 1663 and 1673 with royal aid and settled by marriage, has her as no. 13452, “Marie-Madeleine Chretien”, married on 20 October 1670 to Pierre Chicoine Bellevue; she is also on the list of the Société des Filles du roi et soldats du Carignan and in Yves Landry’s study of the Filles du roi. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Madeleine Chicoine (1672–1745).

Marriage and family

The marriage register of Notre-Dame de Montréal names Madeleine as the daughter of Toussaint Chrestien and Françoise Bertault, of Saint-Eustache in Paris, and Pierre as the son of Gilles Chicoinne and Perrine Boisaubert, of Channay in the diocese of Angers in Anjou. Both were single. Yves Landry’s study gives her arrival in the colony as 1670, the year of the marriage, and says she could sign her name. The register names the first witness as Charles Le Moyne, son of noble homme Charles Le Moyne, écuyer, sieur de Longueuil, the lord of the land on which Pierre lived. Under the seigneurial system^W a settler held his land from such a seigneur.

The couple’s children were baptised over some twenty years in several parishes along the St. Lawrence: at Montréal in 1672 and 1674, at Boucherville in 1676, at Contrecoeur in 1681, 1684 and 1686, and at Montréal again in 1688 and 1691. Their daughter Marie Madeleine, baptised at Montréal on 11 March 1672, when her parents were living at Longueuil, married Louis Guertin. Four of the couple’s children married between 1700 and 1727, at Montréal, Varennes and Contrecoeur.

Tanguay’s Dictionnaire généalogique gives Madeleine’s birth as 1652, at Paris; that is a compiled date, and no baptism has been found; Landry’s study puts her birth at about 1646. Pierre died before September 1692, and Madeleine married a second time at Contrecoeur on 19 June 1702. Her second husband was Louis Pierrecot de Bayeul, an écuyer^W of the parish of Bourbaudoin in the diocese of Rouen, and the witnesses were seigneurs of the district, among them the seigneur of Contrecoeur. The index of the marriage register calls her “single”, though she was Pierre’s widow; the word appears to be an error of the index. The marriage produced no children on record.

Madeleine was buried at Contrecoeur on 25 February 1709. The burial register calls her the wife of Louis “Audet de Bayeul”, écuyer, “enseigne dans les troupes”, so she was still married at her death. When her daughter Marie Madeleine was buried at Verchères in May 1745, the register called her the daughter of the late Pierre Chichoine and of Marie Madeleine Chrétien, both then dead.