Élisabeth Gobinet

A carpenter Maisonneuve had recruited himself

Élisabeth's husband, Paul Benoit, was a master carpenter from Châtillon-en-Bazois in the Nivernais — his dit-name, recorded in Quebec as "Livernois," is a misspelling of Nivernois, the same mechanism that gave the Oligny line its own "Lauvergnat" a century later, a provincial origin worn down into an ordinary-sounding surname. In May 1653 he signed on at La Flèche to serve Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve and Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière, and crossed to Montréal that November aboard the Saint-Nicolas — part of the Grande Recrue, the recruitment drive Maisonneuve personally organized when Ville-Marie had shrunk to a few dozen people and stood on the edge of being abandoned. Marguerite Bourgeoys and Jeanne Mance crossed on the very same ship.

The question of whether that dit-name survived three generations down to Paul and Élisabeth's own granddaughter, Marie-Josèphe Benoit, was carried open on this page for a long time. It is now closed, and the answer is yes.

The descent runs in unbroken form: Paul Benoit dit Livernois and Élisabeth Gobinet → their son Étienne Benoit Livernois, who married Jeanne Campois (Marie-Jeanne-Marguerite Campeau, in PRDH's rendering) at Longueuil about 1697–98 by the sighted act's own age statement, or on 3 February 1699 at Montréal by PRDH — a discrepancy logged on the Étienne Benoits page → their daughter Marie-Josèphe Benoit Livernois, baptised at Longueuil on 16 December 1715. All three generations carry the compound surname on their own records. By the time Marie-Josèphe's daughter married in 1763, the act had dropped the Benoit altogether and reads simply “Marie Joseph Livernois” — the dit-name having finished the job it started in the 1650s, and replaced the name it was only ever meant to clarify.

So the earlier hedge was too cautious. The acts establishing Marie-Josèphe's own parentage don't all carry the name, which is what prompted the doubt — but the acts establishing her father's and her grandfather's do, and the 1763 act carries it forward past her. What looked like a name that might have been misread upstream turns out to be a name that outlasted the surname underneath it.

Enlistment record, notary Lafousse, La Flèche, 23 May 1653 · graded Proven

Married the same day as six other couples

Élisabeth was born around 1641 at Gonesse, north of Paris, daughter of Nicolas Gobinet and Marguerite Lorgeleux — her origin was long misread in this project as Bourges, a mistake corrected once her actual 1658 marriage contract was read directly. She had lost her father by the time she crossed to New France in 1658, a fille à marier finding her own way over, five years ahead of the crown's more famous filles du roi program. She married Paul at Notre-Dame de Montréal on 16 September 1658, seventeen years old — the same day as six other couples, in a settlement small enough that a week's worth of weddings could be handled at once. Governor Maisonneuve himself stood among the witnesses at the marriage contract, alongside Jeanne Mance and several of the colony's other founding figures; not, as this project once assumed, a mark of the couple's particular standing, but simply the ordinary business of a governor who had recruited the groom himself five years before, in a colony too small for it to be otherwise. Neither Élisabeth nor Paul could sign their own names to the contract.

Marriage contract, notary Bénigne Basset, 9 Sep 1658, Ville-Marie · marriage act, 16 Sep 1658, Notre-Dame de Montréal · graded Proven

Eleven children, and loss running through nearly every one

Élisabeth and Paul had eleven children baptized at Notre-Dame-de-Montréal between 1659 and 1679. Two, Jacques and Yves, disappear from the sacramental record after their own baptisms, with no marriage or death ever located. Of the rest, several died young: a daughter named for her mother died in 1685 at twenty-six; Marie-Anne died in 1697 at thirty-two, two years after remarrying following her first husband's death; Hélène died in 1693 at twenty-five; Geneviève died in 1689 at seventeen, ten months after her own wedding. Three sons lived long lives — Laurent to sixty-seven, Étienne to eighty-three, François to seventy-three — a spread from early death to old age inside one household that this record captures with unusual completeness for a family of this period.

PRDH family sheet and parish burial acts, Notre-Dame-de-Montréal and collateral parishes, 1659–1750 · graded Proven for the recorded deaths; two children's fates remain Unproven

Twenty-nine years a widow, and the record only gets richer for it

Paul died 1 January 1686 at Longueuil, buried two days later at Boucherville. Élisabeth was forty-five, and would live another twenty-nine years — longer widowed than married. Because she outlived him and held property in her own right, she enters the notarial record in a way the parish register alone would never have captured. In 1692, fifty-one years old, she personally counted out a hundred livres in coin to settle half a debt tied to her late daughter's marriage, and secured a standstill on the rest until her own death. The following year she contracted to raise a two-year-old girl, Marianne Gayeur, for twelve years in exchange for the girl's father surrendering his own claim on Paul's estate. Neither contract bears her signature; she never learned to write. The most substantial document of her life came in 1714, a year before she died: "se voyant dans un âge caduque" — seeing herself grown too old to manage her own land or keep her own house — she gathered every one of her children and grandchildren at Longueuil and arranged her own care: a yearly pension charged against her property, the right to live with whichever child she chose, sick or well, each of them taking a turn.

Notarial acts, 1692, 1693, and 1714, greffes of Claude Maugue and Marien Tailhandier · graded Proven

Élisabeth died 2 April 1715 and was buried the next day at Longueuil, seventy-six by the burial act's own count — two years more than the c. 1641 her marriage contract implies, the ordinary drift of a stated age — her sons Laurent and Étienne standing at the graveside, neither of them able to sign for her any more than she had ever been able to sign for herself. Her descent reaches both families independently — through one daughter's line down to Julien Oligny, through a granddaughter's second marriage down through the Gauthier dit Saint-Germain family to Marie-Anna Saurette — a second convergence, entirely separate from Marguerite Doucinet's, that closes the same gap by a different road. See the convergence for both full descent charts.