♂Pierre Emery dit Coderre

Pierre Emery dit Coderre (a parish-register index gives his birth as 29 January 1671) was a son of the Contrecoeur settler Antoine Emery dit Coderre and his first wife, Marie Devault, and a man whom the Montreal court records name in guardianship proceedings in 1697 and 1715 for his younger siblings, and in 1705 for the children of his brother Louis (his nephews and nieces). He was the half-seventh great-grand-uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the half-brother of Francois Emery dit Codere (1700–1755), Nancy Jane’s seventh great-grandfather.

Early life

A parish-register index gives Pierre’s birth as 29 January 1671, with no place named. Tanguay’s dictionary gives his baptism six days later, on 4 February 1671, at Boucherville, and the sources do not settle where he was born. His father had come to Canada as a soldier of the Carignan-Salières regiment, and his mother had come out as a fille du roi^W. Tanguay gives the couple eleven children, of whom six were alive in 1697. Tanguay’s dictionary gives his mother’s burial in December 1687, when Pierre was sixteen; his father married again in June 1688.

Guardian to his brothers and sisters

In March 1697 his father, then living at the Isles de Monsieur Boucher, asked the court at Montreal to appoint guardians for the children of his first marriage. The petition of 22 March lists six surviving children and gives Pierre’s age as twenty-seven. The next day the lieutenant general heard seven relatives and friends, among them Pierre, recorded as Antoine’s son, and Nicolas Bonin, his sister Marie’s husband. Pierre was not himself one of the wards. The court ordered that Antoine remain guardian of the four who were, with Bonin as his deputy.

A court catalogue entry of 1705 names a Pierre Emery as guardian and paternal uncle of the three children of his brother Louis, who had died by then (Tanguay’s dictionary gives his burial in 1703); the entry fits Pierre, since Tanguay places Louis in the same sibship.

After Antoine’s death about 1713, the question came back. His widow, Marie Anne Favreau, petitioned on 5 April 1715 for a guardian for her ten minor children, and Pierre was named deputy guardian, signing the record “P. Aimeric”. The clerk of that act calls him the children’s uncle, in one place paternal and in another maternal, while the judgment of 27 September 1715 that divided the estate between the two marriages calls him ‘fils dudit défunt’, son of the late Antoine; the mother’s name is attached to Marguerite’s clause, not his. The judgment has him appear opposite the widow beside Nicolas Joüay, the husband of his sister Marguerite. The records are treated here as one man. On 24 March 1716 Jean Baptiste Renaud appeared for Pierre and Marguerite before the court, and that is the last record of him in the sources cited here.

Marriage

Tanguay’s dictionary gives Pierre a wife, Jeanne Gilles, without a date or a place for the marriage. No children are recorded.

Notes

Dates and age

The index and Tanguay differ on the baptism by six days. The petition of 1697 gives his age as twenty-seven, one year more than the baptism implies; the petition qualifies all its ages as approximate.

The receipt of 1699

The recital in the 1715 judgment lists a receipt of 22 January 1699 given by “Pierre et Louis Aymerie” to “their late father” for their share of the movables. Antoine lived until about 1713, and the records do not explain the wording.