Jacques Saurette

A French parish, half-read

Jacques was born around 1704 in a parish the record itself is hard to pin down: his 1741 marriage act names him fils de Jacques Sorette et de Marguerite Bary, of “la paroisse de Monceau[?] de l’évesché du Mans” — the diocese of Le Mans, in what is now the Sarthe department. The word after “paroisse de” resists a confident reading on the image itself. The leading candidate is Moncé-en-Belin, a real commune still on the map south of Le Mans, but it is a candidate, not a certainty — the strongest unresolved lead in the whole Saurette register, and the place this line would need to go if it is ever pushed further into France.

Marriage act, 7 Jan 1741, Chambly (St-Joseph) · graded Proven as to the diocese of Le Mans; Probable as to the specific parish

Marriage at Chambly, and a soldier's witness

Jacques married Catherine Laporte on 7 January 1741 at Chambly (St-Joseph), daughter of Paul Laporte and Catherine Savary. A Récollet priest, acting as parish curé, officiated. Among the witnesses stands a man recorded only as “Saint Jean Soldat” — a soldier's presence at the wedding of a man his family always described as a soldier himself, stationed at Fort Chambly with the Compagnies franches de la Marine. No service record has been sighted to confirm this directly; it rests on family tradition, the witness, and the timing — Jacques married well before the metropolitan regiments reached Quebec in the 1750s, consistent with an earlier colonial garrison posting rather than a later one. Catherine's own baptism, twenty years earlier, carries an even earlier thread connecting this family to the Olignys' side — see Anne Seigneur & Jean Besset for the 1721 connection, the earliest documented contact between these two families anywhere in this project.

Marriage act, 7 Jan 1741, Chambly (St-Joseph) · graded Proven as to the marriage and the witness; Possible as to the specific military service

Widower, and an estate settled in a habitant's kitchen

Catherine Laporte died in late 1774, buried 1 November at Chambly. Three weeks later, on 23 November, Jacques — by then recorded under a notarial spelling of his name, “Chorel dit Larose” — sat down in his own house at Chambly with a notary from Beloeil to inventory everything he and Catherine had held in common, so the estate could pass properly to their children. The document is a small window into a family that could not write: Jacques himself, his son Michel, and both estimators appointed to value the property all signed with marks, ne savoir signer. Only the notary and two merchant witnesses could write their names. Four surviving adult children took part or are named: Jean-Baptiste (the direct line forward), Michel, Antoine, and Josephte, by then married to Jacques Sené.

Four days later, on 27 November, the three sons formally renounced their claim on their mother's estate and any future claim on their father's, each receiving 100 livres in exchange — a common enough arrangement, framed in the act's own language as a mark of the sons' tendresse, respect, soumission toward their father.

Estate inventory, 23 Nov 1774, and donation act, 27 Nov 1774, Chambly (notary at Beloeil) · graded Proven

A second marriage, briefly

Jacques remarried on 11 February 1782 at Chambly (St-Joseph), to Marie-Josèphe Pellerin dit Chrétien — he was 77 or 78 by then, she the daughter of Pierre Pellerin and Marie-Anne Leroux Cardinal. There were no children of this marriage. She died two and a half years later, on 4 November 1784, and was buried the following day at Chambly.

Marriage act, 11 Feb 1782, Chambly (St-Joseph) · graded Proven

A name that never quite settled

Across every document that touches Jacques — his own marriage acts, the 1774 estate papers, his children's marriage records — his surname is rendered a different way nearly every time: Sorette, Soret, Sorel, Chorel, Sauret, and eventually Saurette, the form that finally held after about 1800 in the registers of St-Jean-Baptiste-de-Rouville. Underneath all of it sits one constant: Larose, the nom de guerre a soldier carried into civilian life and passed down to his sons and grandsons long after anyone still living remembered why. A family etymology holds that saur or saure — a color word for tawny or yellowish-brown, surviving in modern French mainly in hareng saur, a smoked herring — sits behind the name. It is a plausible derivation for a French surname in general; tracing this particular family to that particular root is a good story rather than a proven one. See Dit Names for the four documented mechanisms behind variants like this across both family lines.

Graded Proven as to the nom de guerre and its persistence in the records; the etymology itself is unproven color, not a documented claim

Jacques died 9 October 1790 and was buried the next day at l’Acadie (Sainte-Marguerite-de-Blairfindie), around eighty-six years old — the same parish, decades later, where his great-grandson Isaac would be born. Of the ten children recorded to Jacques and Catherine, several did not survive infancy; his eldest son, Jean-Baptiste, carries the direct line forward, having himself married three times and already raising his own family by the time the 1774 estate was settled.