♀Marie Dubois

Marie Dubois is named in a Québec register of the settlers’ French origins as the mother, with her husband André Leroy, of Jean Roy, who was born in 1633 in the parish of Saint-Étienne at Marans, a town near La Rochelle, and crossed the Atlantic to settle at Montréal, in New France. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Jean Roy (born 1633).

Jean married Françoise Bouet, who is also said to have come from Marans. Their first child was baptized at Montréal in 1660, and by 1666 Jean was farming on the island of Montréal with his wife and their young children.

Notes

The parentage

André Leroy and Marie Dubois are named only in the Fichier Origine, a file of the French origins of Québec’s settlers, in its entry for their son. The entry gives Jean Roy’s birth in 1633 at Marans, in the parish of Saint-Étienne, names his parents as André Leroy and Marie Dubois, and names his wife as Françoise Bouet, written Bouhet there. No baptism naming Jean is known, and the Montréal records of his life do not name his parents, so the parentage rests on the file alone; it is given on this page as probable. Jean’s age in the Montréal census of 1666, 33, agrees with the year of birth the file gives. The file’s entry for Françoise Bouet gives her baptism in the same parish of Saint-Étienne at Marans, in 1624. No record of Marie Dubois’s own birth, marriage or death is known, nor the names of her parents.

The name

The Fichier Origine writes the father’s surname Leroy and the son’s Roy, and the son’s records in Canada use both forms: the census of 1667 lists him as “Jean Le Roy”, and the marriage contract of his son Louis in 1697 calls him “Jean Roy dit LeRoy de Lachine”. This page follows the file, with Leroy for André and Roy for Jean.