Marguerite Ardion

A Huguenot girl from La Rochelle

Marguerite was born about 1638 in La Rochelle, baptized into the Reformed faith, daughter of Pierre Ardion, a master mason and stonecutter, and Suzanne Soret, herself the daughter of a Protestant merchant. Her parents had married on 12 February 1623. Pierre was buried at the Reformed church in La Rochelle on the last day of 1641, aged forty-seven; Suzanne outlived him by nine years, buried at the same Protestant church on 8 July 1650. Marguerite grew up, then, in a Huguenot household in a city that was itself the center of French Protestantism — the same milieu, and very possibly overlapping circles, as Marguerite Doucinet's own family a few years earlier.

Marriage act, Jean Rabouin × Marguerite Ardion, 28 Oct 1663, Notre-Dame de Québec (her own parentage, stated directly) · Peter Gagné, Before the King's Daughters (biographical detail) · graded Proven as to her parentage; Probable as to the fuller biography, which rests on Gagné's published account rather than acts sighted directly by this project

Three marriages

In 1659, still in France, Marguerite married Laurent Baudet, by a marriage contract before notary Teuleron. They had one son, also named Laurent. Widowed, Marguerite crossed to Québec with her young son, arriving 30 June 1663 aboard Le Phoenix de Flessingue. She was twenty-five, and she arrived having already lost everything a person can lose on paper: both parents dead, and a husband dead too. A compiled reference records her simply as widowed in France — three words for the reason she was on that ship at all.

On 28 October 1663, at Québec City, she married a second time, to Jean Rabouin, a plowman from the parish of Saint-Nicolas, La Rochelle, son of François Rabouin and Marguerite Chassé. Neither could sign the marriage contract, drawn up eleven days earlier by notary Audouart. Jean had enlisted at La Rochelle in April 1656 to work in Canada as a plowman. Over the next fourteen years the family had eight children together — Marie, Suzanne, Marguerite, Élisabeth, Anne, Marie-Madeleine, Jacques, and Marie-Angélique — the household moving from Québec City to Château-Richer and finally to Sainte-Famille, Île d'Orléans, where the youngest was baptized in September 1677.

Marguerite died shortly after — the date isn't stated outright, but it can be bracketed tightly: her last child was baptized 28 September 1677, and Jean Rabouin had already remarried, to Marguerite Leclerc, by 8 September 1678. She died at Sainte-Famille sometime in that eleven-month window. Rabouin went on to marry a third time in 1706 and died the following year.

Marriage act, 28 Oct 1663, Notre-Dame de Québec · Gagné, Before the King's Daughters · graded Proven as to the second marriage; Probable for the rest, resting on Gagné's account

The son who carried a different name forward

None of the eight Rabouin children carry this project's line. It's the son from her first marriage — Laurent Baudet, who crossed to Québec with her as a small boy and doesn't appear again in her own biography after that — who does. On 16 May 1684, before the notary Séverin Ameau, he married Marguerite-Louise Crevier, and the contract names his mother outright: "filz de feu [—] Bodet... et de Marguerite Hardion, aussi deffuncte." Ardion with an aspirated H, the same orthographic habit this project has met repeatedly in these hands.

The bride is named in the same clause as daughter of Nicolas Crevier, Sieur de Bellerive, and Louise Lecoutre — another of the four filles du roi on this site. Both mothers are named in one document, on one day. And on that same day, before the same notary, Lecoutre appeared in person to arrange her daughter's board while the groom was away, and signed her own name to it.

Two things on the contract don't resolve cleanly, and neither is treated here as disqualifying. The groom's father's given name is illegible on the minute — PRDH, transcribing the same document, marks it unreadable too and supplies "Laurent" from their own separate record rather than from the page. And the contract calls Laurent a native of St-Nicolas parish, La Rochelle, where his French baptismal record gives Ste-Marguerite — an ordinary slip for a man describing his origin from memory twenty-two years after leaving as an infant.

Marriage contract, Laurent Bodet × Marguerite Louise Crevier, 16 May 1684, before Séverin Ameau · notary's repertoire, entry 364 · PRDH transcription of the same minute · graded Proven as to the marriage and as to Ardion being the groom's mother; the groom's father's given name is not recoverable from the act

Two daughters, two families

The fork happens at Laurent's own marriage, not a generation later. Laurent Baudet and Marguerite-Louise Crevier had (at least) two daughters: Marie Baudet, who married Jean Massé at La Prairie between 12 February 1703 and 27 October 1704 — the act itself carries no date, written as a certificate rather than a dated register entry, but Drouin's own index brackets it precisely between two neighboring dated acts — and Marguerite Baudet, baptized 5 November 1687 at Cap-de-la-Madeleine, who married Noël Paquet at Chambly on 1 April 1709. Each daughter's own descendants carry the line to a different one of the two people who married at Holyoke in 1912, without any idea they were already cousins.

Marriage act, Jean Massé × Marie Baudet, La Prairie (Notre-Dame-de-la-Nativité), between 12 Feb 1703 and 27 Oct 1704 · marriage act, Noël Paquet × Marguerite Baudet, 1 Apr 1709, Chambly · graded Proven

To Joseph Philorum Oligny — through Marguerite Baudet

Marriage acts throughout — Marguerite Baudet & Noël Paquet sighted directly (Chambly, 1709); Anne Paquet's own baptism names both her parents (La Prairie, 1730); Bessette generations sighted 1750–1807 · graded Proven end to end. Laurent Baudet's own 1684 marriage to Marguerite-Louise Crevier — the one joint shared with the Marie-Anna route below — is sighted as a notarial contract, not as a parish marriage act; no separate church register entry for the wedding itself has yet been located as an original. The contract is what's cited above and throughout this page.

This is not the same route as Marie-Anna Saurette's, below, and it shouldn't be read as one — Laurent Baudet and Marguerite-Louise Crevier had two daughters, and each carries the line to a different one of the two people who married at Holyoke in 1912. This route also happens to be identical, generation for generation, to Marie-Louise Lecoutre's own path to Joseph Philorum — unsurprising, since Ardion and Lecoutre are the paternal and maternal grandmothers of the same two Baudet sisters, and both therefore reach him by the same Paquet–Bessette road, one generation apart at the top. Ardion also reaches Joseph a second way, one generation longer: through Marie Baudet's other daughter, Françoise Massé, whose 1746 marriage act names Jean Massé and Marie Baudet as her parents, and then down the Davignon–Gabouriau chain that Françoise Duval's page carries. Both routes are real; this page shows the shorter one.

To Marie-Anna Saurette — through Marie-Thérèse Massé

Marriage act, 1728 · the already-established Doucinet descent from Marie-Angélique Laporte onward · Proven end to end. Marie-Angélique Laporte × Jean-Baptiste Robert dit Lafontaine, once dated only c. 1760 and graded Probable, is now sighted directly at 1 October 1753, Chambly — the same joint Doucinet's own chain shares; see The convergence.

This list rejoins Mathurine Desbordes' own chain to Marie-Anna at Isaac Morier and Marie-Ezilda Gaboury — two entirely independent ancestresses, sighted through two entirely different sets of acts, arriving at the same married couple.

Both joints that stood open at the top of this chain are now closed, though not in the same way. Her son's 1684 marriage was found — a full notarial contract naming her by name. Her own marriage to Laurent Baudet never will be: it happened in France in 1659, by a contract before a La Rochelle notary, and no Québec act was ever created to find. That's a real answer rather than a gap. Everything from there down to Joseph and Marie-Anna is sighted, on both sides, end to end. She left La Rochelle a Protestant, buried a husband she barely appears alongside in the record, raised eight more children with a second, and never met either of the two people three centuries later who owe her twice over.