♀Marie Condor

Marie Condor (1548 – 1627) was the wife of a Paris master mason, Guyon Turgis, and outlived him by some eighteen years, dividing her goods among her children before she died. She was the eleventh great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Claude Saint-Étienne de La Tour (about 1570 – after 1636).

Marriage

Marie Condor was probably born in 1548, and about 1569 she married Guyon Turgis, a master mason and bourgeois of Paris^W. In 1575 the couple bought a house in the rue Pagevin, in the parish of Saint-Eustache, from François Massé, a tailor, and they lived there for the rest of Guyon’s life. It had two rooms: a large chamber with a fireplace, furnished with five chairs, six stools, two chests, a two-door sideboard and a walnut bed hung with blue Beauvais serge, and a small room that served as the kitchen.

The couple had seven children, born between 1570 and 1589. The eldest, baptized Nicolas, later took the name Claude and, about 1592, married Marie de Salazar, a widow of noble family.

Widowhood

Guyon Turgis died in Paris on Sunday 5 April 1609. On 22 April an inventory of his goods was taken in the presence of his eldest son, who called himself Nicolas Turgis, sieur de La Tour, of Baigneux near Saint-Just in Champagne. The furniture and goods came to 208 livres tournois^W and 8 sols, the estate of a poor man. Marie declared that their son owed the household 64 livres “pour argent presté” (for money lent).

Among the papers in the house was a note signed by Marie de Salazar on 11 August 1601 for a debt of 76 livres owed to Guyon, and on its back was written that the money was for twelve écus handed to her husband before he left for Canada. The mason’s household papers are what date his son’s first voyage to the New World, soon after August 1601.

In her widowhood Marie lived in the rue Montorgueil, in the parish of Saint-Sauveur, in the house of her son Guillaume, a mason like his father. On 15 April 1626 she divided her goods “de mettre cy apprès en repos tous ses enfans” (to set all her children at rest hereafter). Four of the children received shares, the other three having had theirs earlier, and she declared that her eldest son owed her nothing. She died in Paris in 1627 or a little before: she was living on 15 April 1626, and by 13 July 1627 her granddaughter Angélique was claiming from her father the share that came to her from Marie’s estate.

Notes

Sources

The account of the household, the inventory, the division of 1626 and the children is Léopold Lanctôt’s, in Familles acadiennes, tome II (1994), pp. 49-52, which quotes the inventory of 22 April 1609 found in the Archives de Paris by Robert Le Blant, and the deeds of 1626 and 1627. George MacBeath’s biography of her son in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1, names the parents as “Guyon Turgis, mason, and Marie Condor”.

Dates

The years 1548 and 1627 in the opening line come from an online family tree (WikiTree) that cites no record. Lanctôt gives no birth year for her and places her death between 15 April 1626 and 13 July 1627, in her son Guillaume’s house.

The name

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography spells her name Condor; Lanctôt and Stephen White’s Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes give Condot.