♀Marie Poiré

Marie Poiré (buried 6 January 1715) was a Parisian from the parish of Saint-Laurent who came to New France in 1669 as one of the filles du roi^W and married the Norman settler Jean Hardy at Québec that October; they made their home at Dombourg, west of Québec, and raised six children. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her son Pierre Hardy (born 1672).

Paris to Québec

She was the daughter of Toussaint Poiré and Catherine Chatou, and both her parents were dead by the time she married. The filles du roi were young women whose passage the French crown paid so that the colony’s settlers could marry. Yves Landry’s study of them records that she arrived in 1669 with goods valued at 950 livres and the king’s gift of 50 livres, and that she could sign her name. The same study records that on 27 September 1669 she contracted to marry another settler, Jean de Lalonde, before the notary Pierre Duquet, and that the contract was annulled. Seventeen days later she was back before the same notary with a different groom.

Marriage and family

An inventory of the colony’s marriage contracts, compiled by the archivist Pierre-Georges Roy^W, lists the contract of Jean Hardy and Marie Poiré, drawn up before the notary Pierre Duquet on 14 October 1669. A week later, on 21 October 1669, they married at Notre-Dame de Québec, with one of the three banns^W dispensed. The register entered the groom as of Saint-François, Havre-de-Grâce, in the archdiocese of Rouen, son of the late Pierre Hardy and of Isabelle Mehou (written Mihou), and the bride as of Saint-Laurent in Paris, daughter of the late Toussaint Poiré and Catherine Chatou. Jean, born at Le Havre in 1640, had come to the colony in 1661 as a hired man of the Sulpician priests, a compiled origin file records, and he could not sign his name.

They had six children, all baptized at Québec between 1670 and 1678: Anne Jeanne, Pierre, Jean Baptiste, Angelique, Catherine and Jean Francois. When Angelique and Jean Francois were baptized, in 1675 and 1678, the register gave the family’s home as Dombourg, the seigneurie of Jean Bourdon^W west of Québec that became the parish of Pointe-aux-Trembles and is now Neuville.

Death

Marie died first, and was buried at Pointe-aux-Trembles on 6 January 1715; Jean was buried there on 28 June 1715. Their sons Pierre and Jean Baptiste were present at both burials.

Notes

No record of her baptism is known. Landry’s study and Tanguay’s dictionary put her birth about 1641; her burial entry gives her age as 80, which would put it about 1635. Roy’s inventory lists both the annulled contract with Jean de Lalonde and the contract with Jean Hardy, before the same notary, and the published list of the filles du roi by Dussault, Royal and Desfonds counts her among the women of 1669. Tanguay’s dictionary places the marriage at Pointe-aux-Trembles, where the couple later lived; the marriage entry itself stands in the register of Notre-Dame de Québec. The index to Angelique’s baptism writes her surname Poirer.