♀Marie Guertin

Marie Guertin (17 July 1696 – 1766) was a woman of Boucherville, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence opposite Montréal, where she raised a family of at least thirteen children with her husband François Quintal and was buried in 1766. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Marie-Anne Quintal (1720–1792).

Origins

No record naming her parents has been found, and her own marriage record has not been located in the indexed Québec registers. The only Guertin couple known to have baptised a daughter Marie in the 1690s is Louis Guertin and Madeleine Chicoine, who lived at Montréal until about 1698 and then on the Côte de Verchères, at Contrecoeur. They had two daughters of that name baptised at Montréal, one in January 1694 and one in July 1696 (a third Marie, born in 1701, is too young to be her). The elder, born on 24 January 1694, was buried at Montréal on 9 January 1695, aged eleven months, which leaves the daughter born on 17 July 1696 and baptised the next day, when her father was called a “habitant”. Two ties link that family to hers: their daughter Marie Anne Guertin was godmother to Marie’s daughter Marie-Anne Quintal in 1720, and their daughter Madeleine married Michel Quintal of Boucherville in 1727. Louis Guertin and Madeleine Chicoine are therefore taken as her parents, though no record states it. On that reading she is the child born in 1696.

Marriage and family

She married François Quintal (1682–), a Boucherville man whose father, also François, had come to New France from La Rochelle in 1662. The marriage was probably in 1712; their first child, Agathe, was born at Boucherville on 16 August 1713, and the family lived there from then on. The couple had at least thirteen children, born between 1713 and 1732, all baptised in the parish of Sainte-Famille at Boucherville. Three died in infancy: a first Marie-Anne, born in December 1718 and buried the following August at eight months; an unnamed child baptised at home in an emergency and buried in March 1723; and Joseph, buried in 1726 at three months. A second daughter named Marie-Anne, born in July 1720, lived to marry twice and die at Boucherville in 1792. A son, Antoine, died unmarried in 1747 at thirty-two. Several of the other children married between 1732 and 1752, among them Agathe at Nicolet and François at Longueuil.

Death

She was buried at Boucherville on 3 May 1766, aged seventy-two, about two years more than the age a birth in 1696 gives. The burial register describes her as married, the wife of François Quintal, not as his widow, which means her husband was still living at the time; he would then have been about eighty-three.

Notes

At her daughter Marie-Anne’s marriage in 1739 the register spells her surname “Quentin”. A family compilation of 1994 gives her birth as 17 July 1696 at Montréal, which the baptism register bears out, and her marriage as 21 November 1712 at Verchères, which has not been checked against the registers. Earlier records placed her birth about 1694, following her burial age.