Catherine Fourrier

A Paris origin, at last

Catherine Fourrier was born about 1651 in the parish of Saint-Sulpice, in the faubourg Saint-Germain section of Paris, the daughter of Claude Fourrier and Marie Pennetier. After her father's death, she left for Canada in 1670, at about nineteen. This is the first time this project has had a sourced parish, parents, or emigration story for her at all — everything carried here before was an unsourced "St-Sulpice, Paris, 1638," a compiled figure with no citation behind it.

Peter Gagné, King's Daughters and Founding Mothers, p. 252 · graded Probable, an authored and footnoted compilation, not yet checked against a French act of its own

A first marriage, and two daughters

She landed on 31 July 1670, aboard La Nouvelle France — the same ship, the same day, as Françoise Duval, who was about her own age and Parisian like her, and who had also just lost her father. Neither could have known it mattered. Both of them are ancestors of both halves of the 1912 marriage this site is built around; they arrived together and their descendants met again two and a half centuries later, in Holyoke, without a soul in the room aware of it.

A note on the age conflict below, since this bears on it: the same compiled reference that supplies the ship gives her age at arrival as nineteen, which agrees with Gagné and not with the burial act. It is corroboration of a sort, though from a work drawing on Gagné rather than independent of him.

After arriving, Catherine stayed at the Maison Saint-Gabriel. On 14 October 1670, at Montréal, she married Mathurin Mercadier dit Lahaye — an armorer recently arrived from Poitou, son of Georges Mercadier and Charlotte Maurier, of the parish of Saint-Rémy-sur-Creuse near Buxeuil. Neither could sign the marriage contract, drawn up three days earlier. They had two daughters: Élisabeth, baptized 16 September 1671 and buried eleven days later, and Geneviève, baptized 9 December 1672 — after her own father was already dead. Mathurin died sometime between 9 March and 7 May 1672, leaving Catherine widowed with a second child still unborn.

Gagné, King's Daughters and Founding Mothers, p. 252 · graded Probable

A widow remarrying

On 11 May 1672, at Notre-Dame de Montréal, Catherine married Jean Bousquet, a master gunsmith (maître armurier) from the parish of Tonneins in the Agenais, son of the late Jean Bousquet and Isabelle Hileret. One bann had been published; the other two were dispensed. She could not write or sign her name.

Laid end to end, the dates say more than the page has so far let them. Mathurin died no later than 7 May 1672. Catherine married Jean Bousquet four days after that. And she was carrying Mathurin's own child at the altar — Geneviève, not born until that December — visibly pregnant with a dead man's daughter while marrying a second. The dispensed banns aren't a side detail; they're the mechanism that made a four-day turnaround possible at all. This is the same frontier arithmetic this site names elsewhere: a widow alone at Ville-Marie, with no father or brother in the colony to fall back on, had exactly one path to security, and she took it as fast as the Church would let her.

The act names her as "Catherine Fourrier, veufve de Mathurin Marcadier" — a widow, identified by her first husband (dit Lahaye; see above) rather than by her parents, the ordinary convention for a remarrying widow. Her own parentage isn't stated here; it comes instead from Gagné's account above, and that account is graded Probable, not Proven — it hasn't been checked against a French act of its own.

Marriage act, Jean Bousquet × Catherine Fourrier, 11 May 1672, Notre-Dame de Montréal · graded Proven as to the marriage; her French origin and parentage rest on Gagné and are graded Probable, not Proven

A third marriage, briefly

Jean Bousquet died sometime between 13 May 1695 and 24 November 1698. Fourteen years later, on 20 November 1712 at Montréal, Catherine married a third time, to François Martin dit Langevin, a master mason from Anjou already once widowed himself, with nine children by his first wife. Neither could sign the new marriage contract. They settled at Repentigny and had no children together. François died within the year, sometime after 14 May 1713. Catherine outlived three husbands.

Gagné, King's Daughters and Founding Mothers, p. 253 · graded Probable

Her own burial, and an age that doesn't add up

Catherine died on 21 October 1726 and was buried the following day at Repentigny — exactly the dates Gagné's own account independently gives, a real point of agreement between the sighted act and the published biography. The ages don't agree. The burial act gives hers as eighty-eight, which would put her birth at about 1638. Gagné's account, built from her own stated emigration age of about nineteen in 1670, puts her birth at about 1651 — thirteen years later, and would have made her seventy-five at death, not eighty-eight.

Neither figure is chosen over the other here. The burial act is a sighted original, but a death record's stated age is itself secondary information even on a primary document — an informant's best recollection, not a birth certificate — so "eighty-eight" doesn't automatically outrank Gagné's "about nineteen." Both are logged, and the thirteen-year gap stays open rather than resolved by picking whichever number is more convenient. Two of her children were present and named at the burial: Jean et Pierre Bousquet.

That detail matters more than it looks. The act had already named her a clause earlier as "femme de Jean Bousquet" — her late husband. The Jean standing at the graveside is a second man of the same name, her son. Father and son, both Jean Bousquet, both real, distinguished only by where they appear in the same sentence.

Burial act, Catherine Fourrier, 22 Oct 1726, Repentigny (Purification de la B.V.M.) · Gagné, King's Daughters and Founding Mothers · graded Proven as to the burial itself; her age at death is Unproven, logged as an open conflict between a primary and a secondary source rather than resolved

The son who carries both lines

On 16 January 1702 at Varennes, her son Pierre Bousquet married Marie Banlier, daughter of Mathurin Banlier and the late Françoise Vernin of St-Ours. The act names Pierre directly as "fils de feu Jean Bousquet et de Catherine Fourrier" — his father already dead, his mother still living. The bride's clause runs the other way: the feüe sits on her mother alone, and her father was alive to attend. And Catherine was there: the witness list includes ladite Fourrier. Thirty years after her own wedding, she stood at her son's.

The bride's father turns out to be worth a paragraph of his own. Mathurin Banlier dit Laperle was a soldier of the Carignan-Salières regiment — born about 1641 in the diocese of Poitiers, sent out with the twelve hundred men Louis XIV despatched in 1665, and, like most of them, kept in the colony afterwards by a Crown that had always intended to settle its soldiers rather than ship them home. He was buried at Contrecœur on 22 January 1720 — eighteen years after the wedding above, which is why his daughter's marriage act names him living.

One thing that paragraph used to claim, it can't. The regiment's roll carries a Banlier dit Laperle; the 1702 marriage act does not. It reads plainly Mathurin Banlier, with no dit-name attached, and no act sighted by this project attaches Laperle to him anywhere. The nickname is compiled-only — it comes from the roll and from the répertoires that follow it. It is used on this page as a label, because it is how the published sources file him, and not as a second piece of evidence.

That cuts both ways, and the second way pays. The 1668 roll of soldiers who took land in Canada lists its men by nom de guerre and nothing else — no surnames at all. That is precisely why it cannot say which company Germain Gauthier's was: it carries a St-Germain under Contrecœur and a second St-Germain under Saint-Ours, and nothing to tell the two men apart. Read through the same nine pages for La Perle, the result is the opposite. There is one, under Saint-Ours, and no other anywhere in the document. Where a nom de guerre is duplicated the roll is useless; where it is unique it is direct evidence. This one is unique.

So the company on this page does not rest on a compiler's column. It rests on the roll itself, which matters here because the two published répertoires disagree about company often enough that this site cites neither for it. What the finding cannot do is outrun the identification underneath it. The roll places a man called La Perle in the Saint-Ours company; that this man is Marie Banlier's father is the compiled joint, and it holds at Probable–Strong. The company inherits that ceiling and is stated at it, not above it. One document would lift both at once, and it is now possible to say exactly what it looks like: any sighted act — notarial, a land grant, a burial — that attaches Laperle to Mathurin Banlier by name. The roll has the nickname and the parish registers have the man; nothing yet sighted has both.

For a long time that was all it was — a name and a nickname matching a list, which is exactly the kind of thin coincidence this site has been burned by before. What closes it is a published regimental répertoire that records something the list didn't: each soldier's first wife. Against Mathurin Banlier dit Laperle it gives Françoise Vernin, married at Saint-Ours. That is the same woman the 1702 marriage act names, in the priest's own hand, as Marie Banlier's mother — already dead by then. The identification no longer rests on a shared surname. It rests on the wife.

What nobody can give is the date of that wedding. No act for it has been found, and the four sources that offer a year offer four different ones: Verney puts it at or before 1673, Fournier vers 1678, PRDH before 1679, and a fourth compilation 1683. They are not variants of one reading — they span a decade, and the earliest and latest cannot both be true. No act, so no arbitration; the spread is recorded here rather than settled, and no year is asserted.

A published history of the regiment adds what the répertoire cannot: he was granted land on the Saint-Ours seigneury when the regiment was disbanded in 1668, and added to it in 1673 — and at that point his father-in-law moved in with him. That last detail is the one piece of evidence bearing on the marriage date from a direction other than a compiler's guess: a father-in-law in the household in 1673 means a marriage by 1673, which is Verney's end of the spread and not Fournier's. It is suggestive, not decisive, and it is left that way. For a man who otherwise survives as three lines in a list, that is still a household.

A claim briefly made here has been withdrawn. It was stated that Mathurin and Germain Gauthier dit Saint-Germain — the other Carignan soldier in these lines, reaching Marie-Anna by a route that never touches this one — served in the same company. The répertoire does place both in Saint-Ours. But a separate scholarly history of the regiment places Gauthier in the Contrecœur company and puts a different Saint-Germain in Saint-Ours, exactly reversing the two. Two compiled sources, flatly contradicting each other on the point, and no reason yet to prefer either. The coincidence may be real; it is not established, so it is not claimed.

That makes two Carignan soldiers standing at the head of this research, one on each side of the 1912 marriage: Jean Besset dit Brisetout, who took land at Chambly in 1673 and whose descendants run down to Joseph Philorum Oligny, and Mathurin Banlier dit Laperle, whose daughter married into the Bousquets and whose descendants run down to Marie-Anna Saurette. The same regiment, disbanded in the same year, settling two families in the same river valley — who would not marry each other for another two hundred and thirty-nine years.

One caution, logged rather than smoothed over. Mathurin and Françoise had two daughters whose names run together: Marie, born about 1679, who married Pierre Bousquet in 1702 and died at Varennes in 1759 — the one this line descends from — and Marie-Anne, baptised at Contrecœur on 13 November 1684, who married Jean Martin dit St-Martin in 1709 and died at Lanoraie in 1758. A compiled tree consulted while checking this had merged the two, attaching the younger sister's birth to the elder sister's marriage. The 1702 act settles it: the bride is Marie, of the parish of St-Ours, and her mother is already dead. It is the third time on this site that two people sharing a name have had to be pulled apart by hand.

Marriage act, Pierre Bousquet × Marie Banlier, 16 Jan 1702, Varennes, sighted — names both filiations, records Françoise Vernin as already deceased and Mathurin Banlier as living, and gives him no dit-name · PRDH-IGD individual #5537 and family #4794 · Marcel Fournier, Répertoire des officiers et soldats du régiment de Carignan-Salières et de Tracy — married Saint-Ours vers 1678 to Françoise Vernin; its company column is not cited here as evidence · "Rolle des Soldats du Regiment de Carignan Salière qui se sont faits habitans de Canada en 1668," Archives des Colonies, D2C vol. 47, fol. 45–49v, sighted — all nine pages read for the nom de guerre, which appears once, under Saint-Ours · Jack Verney, The Good Regiment, Appendix B — born 1643, settled 1668, land on the Saint-Ours seigneury, enlarged 1673, married by 1673 (his surname there rendered Baulsnier) · PRDH-IGD — married before 1679 · de Jordy — married 1683 · graded Proven as to the marriage, the filiation and the two sisters' separation; the date of Mathurin's own marriage to Françoise Vernin is Unproven, four compiled sources giving four years across a decade and no act located; Probable–Strong as to Mathurin's identification with the soldier, which now rests on the répertoire's naming of his wife matching the sighted act, not on the surname alone — though no act sighted by this project calls him a soldier or gives him the dit-name; Probable–Strong as to the Saint-Ours company, on the sole La Perle entry in the 1668 roll, capped by the same compiled joint and not by anything in the roll itself

Two of Pierre and Marie's sons split the line. Jean-Baptiste, born later that same year, carries it to Joseph Philorum Oligny. Charles carries it to Marie-Anna Saurette. Both marriages are sighted, and both name Pierre as their father outright.

To Marie-Anna Saurette — through Charles Bousquet

Marriage acts sighted at every joint. Marie-Charlotte Bousquet × Jean Archambault, 12 November 1753, St-Denis-sur-Richelieu, is now sighted directly — the sighted act reads "douze," confirming PRDH's date over the Kardex card's "11th." The bride's father is named on the act as Charle Bourguet (a spelling variant of Bousquet already documented elsewhere in this family), standing as a witness alongside three men read as her brothers, Jean-Baptiste, Joseph, and Charles Bousquet. This corrects an earlier version of this page, which had wrongly closed this joint with a different, later marriage belonging to a different Charles Bousquet of the same name; see Corrections. The last two joints closed in September 2026, and this descent is now Proven end to end. Louis Archambault × Josephte Girouard — the joint this chain had previously skipped straight over, and which stood at Probable on a PRDH couple record — is sighted: they married at St-Antoine-sur-Richelieu on 2 October 1797, and the act names Louis fils de feu Jean Archambault et de Charlotte Bousquet, reaching the rung above it in the same clause. And Marie-Charlotte Bousquet’s own parentage, which had rested on compiled couple sheets, is closed from both directions: her baptism at Varennes in November 1734 names Charles Bousquet and Marie-Judith Lebrodeur outright, and her marriage act nineteen years later names her father again. No compiled joint remains on this descent, which is why Catherine Fourrier moves from Probable to Proven and why the count of fully sighted descents is six of eight rather than five.

To Joseph Philorum Oligny — through Jean-Baptiste Bousquet

One joint in this chain carries a second ancestress, and for a long time only this side of it had been read. The 1787 marriage below, Marie-Josèphe Laberge to Joseph Suprenant, is also where Jeanne Denot’s own line arrives — through the groom, her great-grandson, a hundred and nine years and three generations after her own second marriage. Catherine Fourrier reaches this wedding through the bride; everything below this row descends from both women at once.

Marriage acts throughout, sighted · graded Proven, end to end · the surname appears as Phanef (1743, the groom's own sacramental record), Fanet (1765), and Faneuf (1787) across three generations — orthographic drift on one family, not three, resolved 14 Aug 2026; Marie-Marguerite Bousquet's own marriage, once "not yet located," is now sighted directly, closing the last inferential joint on this branch. The Banlier/Beaulieu spelling flag, previously open, is closed: the 1702 act reads Banlier plainly and names the bride’s father as Mathurin, matching the Carignan roll and PRDH.

Eight days apart

Catherine was buried at Repentigny on 22 October 1726. Eight days later, in the same parish, her grandson Jean-Baptiste Bousquet married Marguerite Prevost — the act that closes the Oligny-side branch of her descent. His father Pierre and his brother Charles both stood as witnesses.

Three years after that, at Varennes, Pierre stood godfather at the baptism of Jean-Baptiste's daughter Marie-Marguerite. Two years after that, Charles married in the same parish. Four generations of this family kept turning up at one another's doors in the same two parishes for sixty years, and every one of those appearances now has a document behind it.

Burial act 1726 · marriage act 29 Oct 1726, Repentigny · baptismal act 16 Jan 1729, Varennes · marriage act 17 Nov 1731, Varennes · graded Proven

One thing about this line is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up: even with a documented origin, it doesn't fully hold together. Gagné gives her a parish, two parents, and an emigration story — the first time this project has had any of those for her at all — but it is a compilation, not yet checked against a French act of its own, and it doesn't square with the age her own burial record gives: thirteen years apart, and neither figure retired in favor of the other. What is fully documented, without qualification, is everything after 1672 — nine acts, both branches, no joint resting on a compiled tree. She is better attested as a grandmother than as a girl, even now that the girl has a name and a parish of her own.