Marguerite Doucinet

A baptism the parish register never mentions

Marguerite was baptized in 1641 in the Huguenot temple at La Rochelle, daughter of Pierre Doucinet and Florence Cantau, whose own marriage the temple's register places in 1640. None of this appears anywhere in her Catholic life in New France. Her 1662 marriage act uses no language of conversion, no nouvelle convertie, no note of an abjuration — Notre-Dame de Québec's curé married her as an ordinary Catholic bride, and the record simply moves on as though she had always been one. For generations this project could only note the silence. It took a scholar's independent identification — Marc-André Bédard, working from Father Archange Godbout's own research, tracing her by name through a census of 477 Protestants who crossed to New France — to confirm what the Church's own paperwork had quietly erased.

Founding-Stock research (temple baptism, parents' 1640 marriage) · Bédard's recension, confirming Marguerite by name · graded Proven as to her Protestant origin; the mechanism of the erasure is Proven, its motive unrecorded

Married before the crown paid for it

Marguerite married Philippe Mathieu dit la Barie at Notre-Dame de Québec on 28 December 1662, son of Jacques Matou and Pasquette Moutier of the parish of Grigny, in the Brie. She was twenty-one, and she crossed as a fille à marier — a woman who found her own passage to New France, a year before the crown began subsidizing the more famous filles du roi program that brought her own younger sister over. Her sister, Isabelle Doucinet, arrived four years later under that later program, with a 200-livre dowry the state provided and Marguerite herself never had.

Marriage act, 28 Dec 1662, Notre-Dame de Québec · graded Proven

Two sisters, one village, for the rest of their lives

Marguerite and Philippe were living at Charlesbourg by 1666, their household intact on that year's census with two small daughters. Isabelle and her husband, Jacques Bédard, settled in the same parish and stayed there too — the 1681 census finds both sisters still at Charlesbourg, fifteen years on, each raising a family within reach of the other. They had crossed an ocean apart and did not scatter once they arrived; they stayed in the same small place for the rest of their lives.

1666 and 1681 censuses, Charlesbourg (St-Charles-Borromée) · graded Proven

A burial this project first got wrong by a hundred and sixty miles

For years, the record this project relied on placed Marguerite's death at the Hôpital-Général de Québec and her burial at Charlesbourg. It was wrong. Her actual burial act, read directly rather than through an older derivative source, places her death and burial on the same day, 15 September 1698, at Notre-Dame de Montréal — a hundred and sixty miles from where this project first had her. The act also corrects her husband's own name, garbled in the older source into a plain "Matou": he was Philippe Mathieu dit la Barie, a two-part dit-name collapsed by an earlier transcription into one mangled word. Two sons-in-law stood witness at her burial, Pierre Cardinal and Jacques Lenoir, neither able to sign his own name.

Burial act, 15 Sep 1698, Notre-Dame de Montréal · graded Proven; supersedes an earlier, incorrect derivative record

Marguerite's descent reaches both the Oligny and Saurette lines through two entirely separate daughters — one line running through her daughter Marie Matou down to Julien Oligny, the other through a second daughter down to Marie-Anna Saurette — each chain sighted on primary acts the whole way, 1662 to 1889. Neither Joseph Philorum Oligny nor Marie-Anna Saurette had any way of knowing they shared this particular ancestral grandmother when they married at Holyoke in 1912. See the convergence for both full descent charts.