Marie-Louise Lecoutre

A blank where the origin should be

Marie-Louise Lecoutre was born about 1648 and came to Canada in 1665, at roughly seventeen. Beyond that, nothing. Peter Gagné's published account of the filles du roi — the standard reference, and the source of most of what's known about her — says plainly that her origins in France are unknown. No parish, no parents, no province.

Two things have since been added to that near-blank, and neither comes from France. A compiled statistical survey of the filles du roi gives her crossing: she arrived 2 October 1665, aboard Le St-Jean-Baptiste de Dieppe, aged seventeen. This page previously said she had no documented crossing at all; she has one now, though it is a compiled figure rather than a passenger list read directly, and her origin before boarding remains exactly as unknown as it was.

The second is stranger, and it points forward rather than back. The same survey records an mitochondrial DNA haplogroup for her line: H3s. Mitochondrial DNA passes from a mother to all her children and onward only through her daughters, which means it descends from Marie-Louise through an unbroken female chain and is, in principle, still carried by living people. Of the four filles du roi on this site she is the one with no parish, no parents and no province — and she is also the only one whose line can be looked for in a living body rather than a French register. Whether that ever leads anywhere is another question. It is not nothing.

To be clear about what that is and isn't: no test has been done for this project, and the haplogroup above is a figure in a compiled survey rather than a result from anybody's sample. If a living woman on an unbroken female line from Marie-Louise were tested and matched, it would corroborate that line and nothing else — mitochondrial DNA says a maternal chain exists, not who anyone's mother was on paper. It could not name a parish in France, which is the one thing this page actually wants.

That's worth stating rather than glossing. Marguerite Ardion has a Huguenot family in La Rochelle documented three generations deep. Françoise Duval has a Paris parish and both parents named. Lecoutre has a year and an age. Of the four filles du roi on this site, she's the one whose French past appears to be genuinely lost rather than simply unsearched.

Peter Gagné, King's Daughters and Founding Mothers, p. 361 · Filles du Roi Informational and Statistical Project, compiled by Nicole Gallant Nunes for the American-Canadian Genealogical Society (ship, arrival date, age, and mtDNA haplogroup) · graded Probable throughout — authored compilations drawing on Gagné and Landry rather than sighted acts; her origin is Unproven and may be unrecoverable

Marriage into the Crevier family

Some time about 1665 she married Nicolas Crevier, Sieur de Bellerive, at Cap-de-la-Madeleine. Gagné himself gives no firmer date than that; the project's own compiled records bracket it as before the end of 1666. Neither is a sighted act, and this marriage remains the one significant thing about her own life that hasn't been documented directly.

The household appears in the 1666 census at Trois-Rivières and settled at Cap-de-la-Madeleine about 1676. At least eleven children are recorded, among them Marguerite-Louise, who carries this project's lines. Two daughters, Marie-Barbe and Marie-Jeanne, became nuns with the Congrégation Notre-Dame — no other family on this site is recorded sending daughters into religion.

Her death is known only by a floor: after 2 February 1689, the date of her last child's baptism. Nicolas outlived her by an unrecorded margin.

Gagné, King's Daughters and Founding Mothers, p. 361 · graded Probable throughout; her own marriage act has not been located

Her husband's family, five generations back in Rouen

The contrast with her own blank origin is stark. Nicolas Crevier's ancestry is documented back through five generations in Rouen: his father Christophe Crevier, Sieur de La Mêlée, baptized there in 1611; his grandfather Nicolas, a merchant-baker; a great-grandfather baptized in April 1581; and beyond him Hugues Crevier, a baker, married about 1560 — living in a house that bore the sign of La Tête Noire, the Black Head.

That named house in Rouen in the 1560s is the oldest concrete detail anywhere in this project. Christophe Crevier was a baker at Trois-Rivières in 1639, a merchant at La Rochelle from 1647 to 1651, and back at Trois-Rivières by about 1652.

Gagné, King's Daughters and Founding Mothers · graded Probable; none of the Rouen material has been checked against French parish records by this project

16 May 1684: her own signature

Both women's crossings are now known, which makes what follows a little sharper: Marguerite Ardion came in on Le Phoenix de Flessingue in June 1663, widowed and twenty-five; Marie-Louise on Le St-Jean-Baptiste de Dieppe in October 1665, seventeen and with nothing recorded behind her. Twenty-one years later their children married each other.

Her daughter Marguerite-Louise Crevier married Laurent Bodet — Marguerite Ardion's son — before the notary Séverin Ameau. The contract names the bride as "fille de Nicolas Crevier [Sr de Bellerive] et de Louise Lecoutre, ses père et mère."

And on the same day, before the same notary, there is a second act. Louise Lecoutre appears in person and undertakes to house and feed her daughter at her own table while Laurent Bodet is away en voyage — almost certainly a dowry instrument, the standard companion to a marriage contract in this period. She signs it herself. The groom did not.

For a woman with no recorded parish, no parents, and no documented crossing, that signature is the single most direct thing this project has of her: not her name written down by a clerk, but her own hand on her own daughter's arrangements.

Marriage contract and companion act, Laurent Bodet × Marguerite Louise Crevier, 16 May 1684, before Séverin Ameau · graded Proven as to her identity as the bride's mother and her personal appearance

Two granddaughters, two families

Marguerite-Louise and Laurent had two daughters who each carry a line. Laurent himself died young — between May 1684 and October 1688, when a later contract records Marguerite as a widow. He was twenty-six at most, and his elder daughter was fatherless before she was five.

Marriage and baptismal acts throughout, sighted · graded Proven · her own marriage to Nicolas Crevier remains the one unsighted joint in her own generation

She shares this marriage contract with Marguerite Ardion — the groom's mother, named in the same document on the same day. Two filles du roi, both attested in one act, one of them in her own hand. Their two lines run parallel from that point down: the same pair of granddaughters, the same two families, the same 1912 wedding at the far end. Lecoutre's own beginning stays blank, and this site doesn't fill it in.