I tell people I come from a long line of only children. While that's not strictly true, Patrick and I grew up without any aunts, uncles or cousins. I met three of my grandparents but he only met one, and he was so young he probably doesn't remember doing that. Thus, when trying to identify a target for this week's prompt, "So Many Descendants," in 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, I had to go back a ways. I considered both my colonial Scots-Irish and German ancestors, who seemed to regularly have a dozen or more children. But when I look at the number of current-day DNA matches, the clear winner has to be ancestors of my French-Canadians great grandmother, Myrtle St. Peter. In fact, I've generally been so overwhelmed by the sheer number of St. Peter and Robert ancestors that I never bothered to learn much about any of them. I decided to sort through the tangle to try to find one poignant story to highlight. Instead, I Learned Some Stuff.
My initial goal was finding a foremother who had emigrated from France to Canada. For Myrtle's ancestors, this generally occurred in the 17th century, about six generations back, so I had more than a hundred from whom to choose. I chose a woman named Antoinette Meunier, and began to research her story.
Herein follows a brief quasi-historical interlude discussing the French colonization of Canada If, like me, your primary knowledge of King Louis XIV and Cardinal Richelieu is from The Three Musketeers, a bit of rounding-out may be in order. Alert: I am not an historian, so this is undoubtedly a huge over-simplification and possibly biased look at things, but, eh, when isn't it? Louis XIV is often characterized as a pretty good King in that he had a long and peaceful reign. Cardinal Richelieu mostly ran the government for him, taking care of little details like persecuting the hell out of the Protestant Huguenots so that Louis could focus on art and culture, things like building the palace at Versailles and designing stylish furniture.
Wanting to make sure they grabbed their fair share of the New World, aka North America, the Crown had eagerly funded the expedition of Samuel de Champlain, who came back and said he'd found a nice spot by a river (it must have been summer), and if they sent some soldiers over, they could probably snag it for themselves without too much trouble. Champlain returned with his troops to the New World and Made Progress, including founding Quebec, and trading with and even more or less getting along with the indigenous peoples. However, the vast number of priests Richelieu had sent in order to ensure the Catholic church remained Large and in Charge reported back that colonization was facing one big complication: the soldiers and skilled tradesmen were all men. Few wives and even fewer single women had made the trip. Many of the French colonists could not read or write and spoke a colloquial patois rather than 'correct' (i.e. Parisian) French. In other words, the colonists were heading toward assimilation by the native peoples, rather than establishing the "New France" for which Louis was paying. Back in France, the priests and nuns that cared for the destitute and homeless heard the call and, in 1634, began to recruit groups of Filles à Marier, "women of marriageable age," to undertake the perilous voyage to an uncertain future on the frontier. At the time, options for single women without family or fortune were extremely limited; their prospects in Europe were bleak enough that 261 women volunteered to leave civilization behind for the chance at something better.
The influence of these women in New France was significant enough that Louis et al decided to make the idea official. The King proclaimed that he would pay for the passage and even provide a dowry for young women willing to cross the Atlantic, naming them Filles du Roi, Daughters of the King. One of the perquisites of the offer was that the women had the chance to choose their new husbands, and even to refuse all offers and return to France should they choose to do so. For young women whose only choices in Europe were arranged marriages or the convent, this was apparently an intoxicating opportunity. To be clear, they were not actually the daughters of the King, nor even generally young women of noble birth. However, although there have been allegations that the Filles were prostitutes and criminals, the vast majority were wards of the Church. All had to provide a letter from their local Priest attesting to their character. Beginning in 1663, the Crown sponsored the transport of over 750 women.
-- interlude fini --
One of these brave and risk-taking women was my 9th-great grandmother, Antoinette Meunier, a childless, 28-year-old widow facing poverty without any prospects. Escorted by nuns, Antoinette made her way to Paris and then to the port city of Dieppe, 300 miles from her village of Ataun. She was given a pair of hose, a pair of shoes, a bonnet, gloves, a comb, a belt and a needle case complete with metal needle. If Louis made good on his offer to give her a 50 Livre dowry, there is no record of that, but her fare was paid. The voyage to Canada took about six weeks. Typically, one out of every ten passengers would die along the way.
On October 2, 1665, Antoinette arrived in Quebec City in the company of eighty-one other Filles, and on November 9, 1665, five weeks after she arrived, she married Jacques Aubert. Antoinette and Jacques had three daughters who survived to adulthood, a bit sub-par. On the average, a Fille produced at least 6 children, and the Church provided a 300 Livre bonus once they managed to have ten. The greater fertility rates were attributed to a relative abundance of food and healthier rural lifestyle, a deliriously successful marketing effort given the excellent chances of death for emigrants during travel, attack by natives, pestilence, or the vicious Quebecois weather. As I plotted Myrtle's ancestry, it occurred to me that I'd been entering one death date over and over: August 5, 1689. It turned out that was the day that 1500 native warriors killed the 375 residents of the village of Lachine. Were they provoked? Absolutely. The totality of the destruction is sobering, nonetheless. Antoinette's husband, Jacques Aubert was apparently successful in his real estate efforts, as he purchased the 90 square miles that is now the village of Grondines and was thus made a Seigneur, entitled to receive rents from the farm families on the land; it wouldn't have been a rich existence but presumably one with some comforts. In 1694, Jacques gave the fiefdom to his son-in-law, Louis Hamelin, before sailing back to France. He was still abroad when Antoinette died on February 25, 1697 at the age of 61.
When I learned about Antoinette's designation as a Fille du Roi , I thought it was interesting, a nice frisson for the story. Then I learned that two-thirds of all French Canadians trace their ancestry to one or more of the Filles. And I found a Facebook Group in which descendants listed their Fille ancestors, often with four or five dozen or more women in their list.
Besides maintaining a strong Catholic presence in New France, Richelieu's army of priests did an absolute amazing job of recording ALL the vital records and those have been remarkably well preserved since then. It took several days to fluff Myrtle's pedigree out in order to find all the emigrees but it was largely a 'fill in the box' exercise. Eventually, I determined that we have thirty-six Filles du Roi ancestors and another 16 who are on the official list of Filles à Marier. Their stories have been researched extensively and I look forward to getting my hands on copies of the rare and only-occasionally-written-in-English books about them. Note to self: learn French asap.
Myrtle St. Peter's Ancestors by Country of Birth. Not sure why the one fellow was born in Belgium -- all his sisters and brothers were born in France. Myrtle was born in Monroe, Michigan in 1881. Her mother's side (dark blue) lived in Detroit, which was still in possession of the French when they moved there. Her father's side was more from Quebec.
I also feel pretty dopey, like one of those people-on-the-street interviewed by late-night talk show hosts who don't know who is buried in Grant's Tomb or which side won the Revolutionary War. I'd never heard of the Filles and had no idea how limited the original French immigrant population was compared to the masses of English, Scots, Irish, German, Scandinavian and Spaniards that headed into what would become the United States. The 1000 or so Filles volunteered for this hardship; it may have been a case of "out of the frying pan and into the fire," but they jumped at the opportunity to have a say in their own futures.
Although I've still not found anyone 'famous' in my own ancestry, I appreciate the attention and recognition that is given to the Filles in Canadian history -- something I clearly need to learn more about. (And I need to learn how to type the rest of the diacritical marked characters, but I can do an é now!)
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