♀Marie Grandin

Marie Grandin (about 1651 – 14 July 1715) was a Frenchwoman from Orléans who married Jean Baudet at Québec in 1670 and raised a family with him along the St. Lawrence above Québec. She is counted among the filles du roi^W, the young women whose passage the French crown paid so that the colony’s settlers could marry. She was most likely the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Louise Baudet (1679–1760).

Origins

Marie Grandin was the daughter of Michel Grandin and Marie Lejeune, of the parish of Saint-Euverte in Orléans, on the Loire; her father was dead by the time she married. She was born about 1651 and is said to have come out to New France in 1670, the year of her marriage, bringing goods valued at 300 livres and a gift of 50 livres from the king.

Marriage and family

A marriage contract between Jean Baudet and Marie Grandin was drawn up before the notary Becquet on 7 September 1670, and they married at Québec, in the parish of Notre-Dame, on 23 September. He was then living at Champigny.

Their first children were baptized just west of Québec: Marie Louise at Sillery in September 1671, Simone Anne there in December 1673, and Jean Charles at L’Ancienne-Lorette in August 1676, by the Jesuit Pierre Chaumonot^W, missionary to the Hurons settled there.

By 1681 the family had moved up the St. Lawrence to the seigneurie^W of Lotbinière, where the census of that year counted Jean, aged thirty-one, and Marie, thirty, with five children, the youngest, Jeanne, fifteen days old. Jean Baptiste, born on 2 September 1683, was baptized at Pointe-Lévy, on the south shore opposite Québec. At least eight children are known in all. Simone Anne married Michel Pinot at Cap-Santé in 1689, Louise married Jacques Marcotte, probably before 1698, and two younger sons, Michel and Jacques, married at Sainte-Croix, near Lotbinière, in 1719 and 1720.

Widowhood and death

Jean Baudet is said to have died in the spring of 1714, between 25 March, when he made his last contract, and 28 May, when Marie Grandin, as his widow, ratified a sale before the notary Louis Chambalon. An inventory of his goods was drawn up on 13 July.

She probably died at the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec^W, the town’s hospital, on 14 July 1715: a woman entered only as “la bonne femme Baudet”, the good woman Baudet, died there that day and was buried in the hospital’s cemetery.

Notes

Origin and the filles du roi

The marriage entry, as indexed, gives her as single and her parents’ parish as “St-Eubert”, of the city and diocese of Orléans; Cyprien Tanguay’s^W dictionary of French-Canadian families writes “St. Aubert”, and Yves Landry’s study of the filles du roi, Les Filles du roi au XVIIe siècle, gives it as Saint-Euverte. The alphabetical table of baptisms of Saint-Euverte for 1646 to 1698 lists no Grandin, so she was probably baptized in another parish of Orléans. Her age in the census of 1681, thirty, puts her birth about 1651. Landry’s study gives her arrival in 1670 with goods valued at 300 livres and a gift of 50 livres from the king, says that she could not sign her name, gives her death as 14 July 1715 at the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, and places the couple’s household at Lotbinière.

She is not the Marie Grandin born about 1609 in Paris, widow of Simon Duhamel, who came to Canada in 1651, nor the Marie Grandin, wife of Claude Robillard, who died at Montréal in 1708.

The marriage

The Québec register, as indexed, dates the marriage 23 September 1670. It names the groom as single and a native of the parish of Blanzais in the diocese of Poitiers, his parents as Sébastien Baudet and Marie Baudonier, and the bride’s parents as the late Michel Grandin and Marie Lejeune; the witnesses were Jacques Gaudry, Nicolas Valin, Michel Maillou and Jean Beriau. Tanguay’s dictionary dates the marriage 28 September. The contract of 7 September 1670 before the notary Becquet is entered in Pierre-Georges Roy’s inventory of marriage contracts, volume 1, page 88, which gives the groom’s surname as Beaudet. Landry’s study also lists the contract, and credits the couple with nine children.

Her husband’s death and her own

The dates of her husband’s last contract, 25 March 1714, of her ratification as his widow before Louis Chambalon, 28 May 1714, and of the inventory of his goods, 13 July 1714, come from a family history of the Baudets and René Jetté’s dictionary of Québec families, as quoted in an online family tree. Landry’s study gives a wider span for his death, between 21 July 1712 and 28 May 1714.

Her burial entry of 14 July 1715 at the Hôtel-Dieu gives the surname Baudet and no forename, so its identification with Marie Grandin, widowed the year before, is probable rather than proved; Landry’s study gives the same date and place for her death. A family tree on FamilySearch, citing the hospital’s daily register of patients, has her admitted on 30 June 1715.

Their daughter Louise

No act names the parents of Louise Baudet, wife of Jacques Marcotte, so her place in this family rests on the compiled genealogies. The couple had two daughters called Louise. The elder, Marie Louise, baptized at Sillery in 1671, married Jacques Houde, according to Tanguay. The younger, Louise, aged two in the census of 1681, is the one René Jetté’s dictionary marries to Jacques Marcotte before 1698; Tanguay had married her to Jean-Baptiste Bisson in 1699, a marriage Jetté gives to her sister Jeanne Françoise. The burial of Jacques Marcotte’s wife at Cap-Santé in 1760 gives her age as eighty-four, which would put her birth about 1676, between the two.