♀Marguerite Housseau

Marguerite Housseau (baptised 28 April 1641) was a woman of Troyes, in Champagne, who crossed to New France and married Jean Meunier at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in 1670. She is counted among the filles du roi^W, the young women the French crown sent out to marry the settlers of the colony. She was most likely the eighth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Marguerite Meunier (died by 1726).

Early life

She was baptized on 28 April 1641 in the parish of Saint-Jean at Troyes, the daughter of maître Nicolas Housseau and his wife Marguerite Bolduc; her godfather was Marc Housseau, most likely her uncle. Her father is said to have been a vinegar merchant. He had died by 1670, and when she married that October the register described her and her mother as “habitans de la paroisse de St Jean de la ville de Troyes”, inhabitants of the parish of Saint-Jean in the town of Troyes.

Marriage

By the standard account of the filles du roi, she arrived in the colony in 1670, bringing goods valued at 300 livres and a gift from the king of 50 livres. Her husband was the son of Mathurin Meunier and Françoise Fafard, whose family lived in the parish of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré. Their marriage contract is listed among the acts of the Québec notary Romain Becquet^W under 31 August 1670, and they were married at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré on 5 October 1670. She was about ten years older than he.

The couple settled at Saint-Laurent on the Île d’Orléans. Four children, Jean, Anne, Paul and Charles, were baptized at Sainte-Famille on the island between 1672 and 1678.

Leaving Canada

After Charles’s baptism in 1678, neither Jean nor Marguerite appears again in the records of Canada: they are missing from the census of 1681, and no burial is recorded there for either of them. The family seems to have left the colony about 1678, most likely for Acadia, where a Marguerite Meunier, held to be their daughter, married François Michel about 1695. The line descends through her.

Notes

Her parents

The 1670 marriage act calls her the daughter of the late Nicolas Housseau and of Marguerite “de Troye”, that is, of Troyes, a place rather than a surname. The mother’s surname in the baptism of 1641 is hard to make out; the Fichier Origine, a file of immigrants to New France, reads it as Bolduc, and Yves Landry’s study of the filles du roi gives Bolduc as well. The Fichier Origine gives her father’s trade as marchand vinaigrier, vinegar merchant, and names her godfather Marc Housseau as her father’s brother.

A fille du roi

Landry’s Les Filles du roi au XVIIe siècle lists her as arriving in 1670 with goods valued at 300 livres and a gift of 50 livres from the king, and adds that she could not sign her name. The Fichier Origine also counts her among the filles du roi. Landry gives her husband’s baptism as 8 January 1651, which makes her about ten years the elder, and he too could not sign. The contract of 31 August 1670 before Becquet is listed in Pierre-Georges Roy’s inventory of the marriage contracts of the French régime and in Landry, who counts four children, the household settled at Saint-Laurent. The four baptisms at Sainte-Famille, Île d’Orléans, are known from the index of that parish’s register.

Where they went

Landry records her as having left the colony about 1678. Where the family went is not stated in any record of Canada; Acadia is inferred from their daughter’s marriage there.

Their daughter Marguerite

No daughter named Marguerite appears among the couple’s four baptisms in Canada, so a daughter of that name would have been born after they left. Her place as their daughter rests on Stephen A. White’s dictionary of Acadian families, the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, as it is quoted in online family trees. No Meunier household appears on the Acadian censuses of 1686, 1693, 1701, 1707 or 1714. Bona Arsenault’s genealogy names other Meunier women at Port-Royal in the same generation without naming their father. Lanctôt’s Familles acadiennes calls François Michel’s second wife, married in 1695, “Marguerite Mignier (ou Meunier)”.