♂Pierre Joffrion

Pierre Joffrion (about 1638 – 17 October 1704) was a French settler in New France who worked as a servant, farmer and labourer at Montréal and at Verchères on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, and who in his last years was called as a witness in the royal court’s trial of a woman accused of abandoning her newborn child. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Jean Joffrion (born 1671).

Origins and arrival

The standard genealogical dictionary of Québec families, under the spelling Geoffrion, gives his origin as Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou, in the diocese of Maillezais; another compilation names Montreuil-sous-Bois near Paris instead. No baptism has been found for him in the parishes of Fontenay, and his parents are unknown. His age was recorded differently each time it was asked: 33 in the census of 1667, 43 in 1681, about 60 in 1697, and 60 at his death, which puts his birth somewhere between about 1634 and 1644. The three ages he gave himself agree on about 1637 or 1638; the age at his burial was given by others.

He was in Montréal by 1667: the genealogical dictionary and an index of the census of that year list him as a domestic servant in the household of Jean Aubuchon. In August 1668 the seigneurs^W of the island granted him sixty arpents^W at the côte Sainte-Anne, for which the annual dues included three live capons every Saint-Martin’s Day^W. Rents owed to a seigneur in New France were often paid partly in kind, and Saint-Martin’s Day, 11 November, was the customary day for paying them. He sold that land in February 1669 for 400 livres, and his signature survives on the deed.

Verchères

Around 1669 he married Marie Briau. No record of the marriage or of a marriage contract survives. By 1672 the couple were living on a concession in the seigneury of Verchères, where their children were born and baptised, at Boucherville and later at Contrecœur. The seigneur, François Jarret de Verchères, had the grants to his settlers drawn up by the notary Antoine Adhémar on 3 October 1675; an incomplete copy of Pierre’s survives in the Québec archives. The genealogical dictionary places the family at Verchères in the census of 1681, and a family biography gives three head of cattle and eight arpents under cultivation; the census lists the tailor Adrien Ponse in the household before Pierre’s, and Pierre exchanged land with him by a private deed at about that time. The couple had nine children between about 1670 and 1685. Two died young: Michel before 1681, and a younger Pierre, buried in December 1686.

Montréal

In the mid-1680s the family moved back to Montréal, although Pierre kept the Verchères farm until 1698, when he sold it for 50 livres. These were the years of the Iroquois raids^W along the river below Montréal. A family history drawn from the notarial records follows him through hard times: in 1684 he authorised his wife, in a note in his own hand, to place their fourteen-year-old son Jean as a servant with Charles Le Moyne de Longueuil, and in 1692, at about fifty, he hired himself out as a mason’s labourer. In 1697, described as a ploughman of Ville-Marie aged about sixty, he was one of some fifteen witnesses in the royal court’s trial of Marie Madeleine Gibault, accused of abandoning her newborn child.

In 1692 he told the notary he could not sign his name, although he had signed his deed in 1669 and written the note of 1684 himself. The records do not explain the change; the earlier documents show that he could write at least a little.

His wife died in 1699. Pierre was buried at Montréal on 18 October 1704, at the age of sixty according to the burial entry. The genealogical dictionary and the family biography give his death as 17 October, the day before, and Tanguay’s dictionary^W records it as a mort subite, a sudden death; the 17 October date has not been checked against a register.