Jean-Baptiste Saurette

Born the year his parents married

Jean-Baptiste was born 24 October 1741, the eldest child of Jacques Saurette and Catherine Laporte, who had married at Chambly that same January — his birth date is not carried on a sighted baptismal act of his own, but follows reasonably from his parents' marriage nine months earlier and the family group sheet's own count of him as their first child.

Inferred from marriage timing and family group sheet · graded Probable

Marriage into the Gauthier dit Saint-Germain family

He married Marie-Catherine Gauthier dite Saint-Germain on 18 July 1763 at Chambly (St-Joseph), daughter of Jacques Gauthier dit Saint-Germain and Marie-Josèphe Benoit Livernois. The act names both filiations outright, and gives her mother as plain “Marie Joseph Livernois” — the Benoit already dropped, three generations after Paul Benoit dit Livernois carried the name off a ship from La Flèche. That descent is now documented end to end; see Élisabeth Gobinet's page. Marie-Catherine died young, 25 June 1774, buried the next day at Chambly, not yet thirty.

The wedding party is worth naming, because it takes three broken families to assemble it. Standing for the groom were his father Jacques Soret and his uncle René Barière, with Basile Pepin and Nicolas Petit. Standing for the bride were Jacques and Louis Gauthier, her brothers — half-brothers in fact, from her father's first marriage — and Louis and Antoine Quenneville, entered as her beaux-frères — the act's word for what we would call half-brothers, sons of her mother's first marriage. Her father had been widowed with ten children, four of whom died within eighteen months of each other in 1742–43; her mother had been widowed from a Quenneville marriage of 1730. Marie-Catherine, born in October 1744, arrived a year after the two survivors married each other.

Not one person in the room could sign. The act records that the groom, the bride, and every witness declared they could not write. The ceremony itself was performed by the curé of St-Denis-sur-Richelieu, with the consent of Messire Carpentier, the Chambly curé — a visiting priest, for reasons the act doesn't give.

Her great-grandfather was a soldier of the Carignan-Salières

Marie-Catherine's father Jacques was the son of Germain Gauthier dit Saint-Germain, born about 1643 at Beaubec in Normandy — twenty-two at his confirmation at Québec in September 1665 — and dead at Boucherville in 1719 — and Germain was one of the twelve hundred men Louis XIV sent to New France in 1665 with the Carignan-Salières regiment.

That claim was held back on this site for some time, and for a good reason: the regimental lists carry five different Gauthiers, and matching an ancestor to a roll on a surname alone is precisely how this project once acquired a wrong regiment for David Monin and had to withdraw it. A name on a list is not a document.

What settles the identification is a wife's name — now confirmed on the act itself. A published regimental répertoire records each soldier's first wife, and against Gauthier dit Saint-Germain, Germain it gives Jeanne Beauchamp, married at Pointe-aux-Trembles on 19 July 1677. That marriage act has since been read directly. It names Germain Gautier, habitant de la coste de Repentigny, son of Germain Gautier of the parish of Beaubec in the diocese of Rouen and of Louise Maillard, marrying Jeanne Beauchamp, daughter of Jacques Beauchamp of the côte St-Jean on the island of Montréal and of Marie Dardenne — with the seigneur himself, Jean-Baptiste Le Gardeur, sieur de Repentigny, standing witness at his censitaire's wedding. And Jeanne Beauchamp is exactly who the sighted record of Jacques's own baptism, nineteen years later, gives as his mother. The other Gauthiers on the roll married other women — Gaultier de Comporté married Marie-Anne Bazire, Gaultier de Varennes married Marie Boucher — and the regiment's other Saint-Germain, Jean Gazaille, married Jeanne Touzé at Québec in 1668. That act has been read too, and it puts Gazaille's origin at Sarazac in the diocese of Périgueux. The two men who shared a nickname came from opposite ends of France, each now documented on his own wedding act.

One thing the acts do not settle is Germain's company, and the reason turns out to be structural. The roll of the regiment's settlers drawn up in 1668 lists its men by their noms de guerre alone — and it carries a Saint-Germain in the Saint-Ours company and another in the Contrecœur company, with no surname attached to either. The two modern compilations that assign these men companies resolved that ambiguity in opposite directions: Fournier puts Gauthier in Saint-Ours and Gazaille in Contrecœur; Jack Verney's history of the regiment puts them the other way round. Neither assignment is evidence — both are inferences from the same silent source — and this site asserts no company for either man. (An earlier statement here that Gauthier and Mathurin Banlier served in the same company rested on one of those inferences and is withdrawn.) Nor does his land answer the question: in 1677 Germain was settled at Repentigny, on neither captain's seigneury, and Carignan soldiers routinely took land from captains other than their own.

What the file does hold is a small corroboration from the year of the landing itself. The confirmation register of Notre-Dame de Québec for 21 September 1665 — nine weeks after the regiment came ashore — includes a Germain Gaultier, age 22, origin Rouen: a Norman of the right name and roughly the right age, at Québec at exactly the right moment. It corroborates his origin and his presence. It does not prove his service, because those confirmations swept up soldiers and civilians alike.

Note where this leaves the claim. The descent from Marie-Catherine up to Germain is now sighted at every joint — her own marriage naming her parents, her father Jacques's baptism naming his, Germain's own wedding naming his. The one element still resting on compilations is the soldier identification itself, and nothing raises that to Proven short of an act calling the man a soldier — a ceiling that belongs to the record rather than to the research. The company question itself has since been run to the ground and closed — the 1668 roll was found and read, and it cannot answer — on the Open Questions page.

Marriage act, Germain Gauthier × Jeanne Beauchamp, 19 Jul 1677, Pointe-aux-Trembles (St-Enfant-Jésus), sighted — names his parents, his origin (Beaubec, diocese of Rouen), his residence (côte de Repentigny), and the seigneur as witness · baptismal act, Jacques Gauthier, 5 Nov 1696, Boucherville (Ste-Famille), sighted — names Germain Gauthier and Jeanne Beauchamp as his parents; a compiled index renders the date 5 December, but the act reads November · marriage act, Jean Gazaille × Jeanne Touzé, 8 Oct 1668, Notre-Dame de Québec, sighted — for the disambiguation · confirmation register, Notre-Dame de Québec, 21 Sep 1665, per PRDH — corroborative of origin and presence only · Marcel Fournier, Répertoire des officiers et soldats du régiment de Carignan-Salières et de Tracy, and Jack Verney, The Good Regiment, Appendix B — consulted for the identification; their company columns are opposite inferences from the surname-less 1668 roll and are not cited as evidence · graded Probable–Strong: every joint of the descent is sighted and the identification rests on the wife's name; only the soldier attribution itself remains compiled, and it does not rise to Proven without an act calling the man a soldier

Marriage act, Jean-Baptiste Soret × Catherine Gauthier dite Saint-Germain, 18 Jul 1763, Chambly (St-Joseph), sighted — names both filiations, all witnesses and their relationships, and the inability of all parties to sign · PRDH-IGD individual #31015 and families #87287, #8280 · graded Proven as to the marriage, the filiations and the witness relationships

Two more marriages

Jean-Baptiste remarried twice more. On 13 February 1775 at Chambly (St-Joseph), he married Marie-Catherine Dejadon, daughter of Charles Dejadon Lacoudray and Marie-Louise Ducas Belleville; she died 16 June 1782. On 16 June 1783 at Beloeil (St-Mathieu), he married Marie-Archange Renaud dit Rainaud, daughter of André Renaud and Marie-Anne Valentin Grégoire. Fourteen children are documented across the three marriages, several dying in infancy — a pattern that runs through this family in this period, and shows up again in his own son Joseph's generation.

Marriage acts, 13 Feb 1775 (Chambly) and 16 Jun 1783 (Beloeil) · graded Proven

A date worth a second look

Jean-Baptiste died 24 December 1785 at St-Mathias-sur-Richelieu — that date holds against three separate sources. One compiled family sheet gives his death as 29 December instead; without a sighted burial act to settle it outright, the 24th is treated as the better-supported date, and the 29th as the weaker one worth revisiting if the burial act ever turns up.

Graded Probable — three sources against one; a sighted burial act would close this

His surviving son Joseph, from the first marriage, carries the direct line forward — born into a family that by 1785 had already lost two wives and several children, and would go on losing and gaining members in roughly equal measure for another two generations.