♀Marie Benoit

Marie Benoit (about 1653 – 18 June 1725) was one of the filles du roi^W, the young women sent to New France with royal help, who arrived in 1667 and married Pierre Favreau, a soldier of the Carignan-Salières regiment^W. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Marie Anne Favreau dit Deslauriers (died by 1737).

Origins and marriage

No record of her parents has been found, and her place of origin is unknown: Yves Landry’s study of the filles du roi lists her, but records her as “d’origine inconnue”, of unknown origin. She came to the colony in 1667, aged about fourteen, and could not sign her name. The registers write her surname Benoist, and Landry spells it Benoît. Landry gives her marriage to Pierre Favreau as before 1668, at Contrecoeur, and credits the couple with thirteen children; a nineteenth-century genealogical dictionary names twelve. Baptisms of eight of them, born between 1675 and 1693, appear in the index of the colony’s parish registers: at Sorel in 1675 and 1677, at Contrecoeur from 1683 to 1686, and at Boucherville from 1688 to 1693.

Boucherville

By 1688 the family farmed land belonging to the seigneur Pierre Boucher^W on the côte Saint-Joseph at Boucherville, and the marriage contract of her daughter Marie Anne with Antoine Emery dit Coderre, drawn up on 5 June 1688, names her as the bride’s mother. They were still Boucher’s farmers in January 1700, when the Boucherville register called Pierre and Marie “fermiers de l’Isle de Mr Boucher” at the marriages of two of their sons: Antoine to Anne Meunier on 11 January, and Mathurin to Madeleine Emery the same month. Madeleine was a daughter of Antoine Emery dit Coderre by his first wife, so Mathurin’s bride was his own sister’s stepdaughter, and his sister’s husband became his father-in-law.

Death

Pierre died in 1708. Marie survived him by seventeen years and died at Montréal on 18 June 1725.