♀Marie Briau

Marie Briau (about 1649 – 24 February 1699) was a settler in New France, the wife of Pierre Joffrion, with whom she raised a family at Verchères and Montréal. A family history drawn from the notarial records says that in October 1684 she admitted before a notary to taking clothing, linen and household goods from the house of a boat captain while he was away, promising to return everything. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Jean Joffrion (born 1671).

Origins

Her origin is unknown; the standard genealogical dictionary of Québec families, which spells her name Priault, says so plainly. She appears in some lists of the filles du roi, the young women sent to the colony with royal help between 1663 and 1673^W, and one family history gives her arrival as 1668. The leading study of the filles du roi does not accept her, because neither a marriage record nor a marriage contract survives to show where she came from. Her name was written Briau, Briault, Priault and Priau.

Marriage and family

She married Pierre Joffrion around 1669; the date is known only from the births of their children. The couple were at Verchères by 1681, when a census index (in the genealogical dictionary and the Québec population-register index) records her aged 36; that age implies a birth about 1645, against the birth year of about 1649, which follows the age of about 50 given at her death, and the records do not reconcile the two. They had nine children between about 1670 and 1685; baptisms at Boucherville and Contrecœur are recorded for five of them. Two of the sons died young.

Montréal

The same family history has the family living in Montréal from the mid-1680s, and tells of a hard life there: in the October 1684 appearance she is said to have declared that she could neither write nor sign. Two weeks later, with a note of authority from her husband, she is said to have placed their fourteen-year-old son Jean as a servant for two years with Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil, at 40 livres a year. The account of the notarial acts rests on the family history alone. Le Moyne de Longueuil was one of the leading men of New France; his sons Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville^W and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville^W later founded French Louisiana.

She died in the Hôtel-Dieu, the hospital of Montréal^W, on 24 February 1699, aged about 50; the genealogical dictionaries give her burial the next day.