Françoise Duval

From Paris, ahead of her sister

Françoise was born about 1651, in Paris. Her own 1671 marriage act — sighted directly, and the primary source this project weighs first — gives her home parish as Saint-Séverin, and names her parents as Jean Duval and Jacqueline Grisel, both already dead by the time she married. Peter Gagné's published account differs on both counts: it places her in the parish of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, and gives her parents as Jean-Pierre Duval and Jacqueline Durand. All of it is recorded here rather than silently reconciled; the sighted act governs the Proven claims, and Gagné's differing parish and parental names are left standing as an open discrepancy, not resolved in either direction.

After her father's death she left for Canada in 1670, at about nineteen, with goods worth an estimated 400 livres for her dowry — a figure a separate compiled survey records independently as 400/50, meaning that 400-livre dowry alongside the standard fifty-livre King's Gift, and an unusually large sum for a woman crossing under the program — a fille du roi, per Gagné, the same as her younger sister. Marie-Madeleine Duval followed the next year, arriving in 1671, also under the program. The two sisters crossed a year apart, by the same route, into the same colony.

Her own crossing has a detail this project missed for years. Françoise landed on 31 July 1670, aboard La Nouvelle France — and so, that same day, on that same ship, did Catherine Fourrier. Both about nineteen, both from Paris, both having lost their fathers, both bound for a colony neither had seen. Two hundred and forty-two years later their descendants married each other in a Massachusetts mill town, and nobody in that church knew the two families had begun on the same deck.

Marriage act, 16 Nov 1671, Notre-Dame de Québec · Peter Gagné, King's Daughters and Founding Mothers · graded Proven as to her parentage and home parish per the sighted act; Gagné's differing parish and parental names are recorded as an open discrepancy, not resolved

An annulled engagement, then a marriage

Before Pierre, there was nearly someone else. On 8 September 1670, notary Becquet drew up a marriage contract between Françoise and Emmanuel Tavare dit Minault. It was annulled; nothing in what survives says why.

On 16 November 1671, with the third marriage bann dispensed, Françoise married Pierre Courault at Notre-Dame de Québec and was given the King's Gift of fifty livres — the same royal marriage gift paid to filles du roi proper, whatever the precise terms of her own crossing had been. Neither spouse could sign the contract, drawn up ten days earlier by the same notary. The sighted act names Pierre as an habitant of the Rivière St-Charles, son of the late Pierre Courault and a mother whose surname wasn't confidently legible on the image (read tentatively as something like "Japon"), of the parish of St-Jacques, Poitiers. Gagné's account gives the mother's name plainly as Jeanne Papot, and places the family in Saint-Germain, a faubourg of Poitiers — likely the correct reading behind an uncertain transcription, though not confirmed independently. Gagné also gives Pierre's own birth year, about 1630, and notes he may have been previously married to Suzanne Bélanger, who renounced Calvinism in 1662 at Notre-Dame de Québec — offered as a possibility in the source, not stated as settled.

Marriage act, Pierre Courault × Françoise Duval, 16 Nov 1671, Notre-Dame de Québec · Peter Gagné, King's Daughters and Founding Mothers · graded Proven as to the marriage itself; the groom's mother's name and birthplace rest on Gagné's reading where the sighted image was uncertain

Five children, and a sudden death

Françoise and Pierre settled at Québec City, where five children were baptized over the next decade: Françoise (2 September 1672), Louis (25 December 1673), René (29 March 1676), Charlotte-Élisabeth (20 May 1678, buried as an infant the following November), and Marie (16 February 1681). Louis and Marie are the two who carry this project's lines — Louis to Marie-Anna Saurette, Marie to Joseph Philorum Oligny — and Gagné's book is what finally gives them exact birth dates rather than the bare marriage-act ages this project had before.

Pierre didn't live to see either child married. He died suddenly on 4 May 1680 at the Jesuit residence of Notre-Dame-des-Anges, and was buried the next day at Beauport. Louis was six; Marie hadn't yet been born.

Peter Gagné, King's Daughters and Founding Mothers · graded Probable, a secondary published source not yet checked against the underlying parish registers

Two more marriages

Widowed with young children, Françoise married again on 12 August 1681, to Antoine Renaud dit Letambour et Larose — himself a widower, previously married in 1666 to a fille du roi, Marie-Geneviève Plémaret, with whom he'd already had six children. Neither could sign the new contract. Françoise and Antoine had six more together at Québec City between 1682 and 1692; two died in infancy. Antoine himself was buried in October 1693.

On 10 December 1695, Françoise married a third time, to François Renaud, a laborer some twenty-five years her junior, born about 1676 near La Rochelle. Whether he was related to her second husband isn't known. They had no children together, and lived out their years in the upper town of Québec. Françoise Duval was buried there on 27 October 1725.

Peter Gagné, King's Daughters and Founding Mothers · graded Probable throughout; nothing in this section rests on a sighted parish act

Of everyone named above — three husbands, eleven children across two families — it's Louis and Marie, from the first marriage, who carry this project's lines forward.

To Marie-Anna Saurette — through Louis Courault

Marriage acts throughout, read directly, no PRDH-only or Webtrees-only joint anywhere in the chain · graded Proven end to end

To Joseph Philorum Oligny — through Marie Coulon

Marie was born nine and a half months after her father's death — a posthumous child, baptized 16 February 1681, who never knew the man whose line she carries.

Marriage acts throughout, read directly, no PRDH-only or Webtrees-only joint anywhere in the chain · graded Proven end to end

Marie Coulon remarried. She's carried above through her first marriage, to Jean Maillot dit La Roche in 1699, because that's the marriage the direct line runs through — but it wasn't her last one. On 20 January 1718, at Chambly, she married Isaac Bordeau, son of Abraham Bordeau and Catherine Rousseau, with one bann published and the other two dispensed. The act names her plainly: “Marie Coulon, fille de Pierre Coulon et de Françoise Dunal.” Widowed sometime after 1699, remarried at Chambly nineteen years later — and independently confirmed on PRDH, matching the sighted act. One of the two witnesses signs as Charles Le Grain dit Lavallée, very likely the same man who held the Chambly militia captaincy from 1711 to 1755 — not confirmed as the identical man, but the same name, the same parish, the same years.

Marriage act, Isaac Bordeau × Marie Coulon, 20 Jan 1718, Chambly (St-Louis-du-Fort) · independently confirmed on PRDH · graded Proven

One row in that list is doing more work than it looks like it is. Marie-Agathe Davignon, four generations down, doesn't only carry Françoise Duval — her mother, Françoise Massé, is Marguerite Ardion's own great-granddaughter. Two entirely different seventeenth-century women, arriving in New France by two different routes, meet in one person a century later: Duval through her father, Ardion through her mother. She carries both into the same marriage, and both eventually into the same household at Chambly.

Françoise Duval buried a husband who died suddenly at a Jesuit residence, remarried twice more, and outlived every one of them, dying in the upper town of Québec at about seventy-four. Her own parentage still carries an unresolved disagreement between a sighted act and a published account — the kind of small, honest gap this project leaves standing rather than papers over. Everything downstream of her two eldest surviving children, in both directions, all the way to 1912, is sighted on paper she never saw written — whatever remains open about the woman herself.