Canadiens, pas français

We generally think of the settlers of Canada and Acadia in New France as French. The colonies were French, and French was spoken there, as it still is in the current provinces of Québec and New Brunswick. Most of the settlers were indeed born in France, but it was not unusual for settlers to have come from other European countries, and among my ancestors are several who did.

A man named Pierre Miville dit Le Suisse (called "the Swiss") was my eighth, ninth, and tenth grandfather through four of his children. He born in 1602 in Fribourg, Switzerland, about 30 km southwest of Bern. In 1629 he married a woman from Fribourg named Charlotte Maugis (or Mongis).

By 1631, they had resettled in Brouage, on the southwest Atlantic coast of France, where their six children were born. By 1649 the entire family had settled in Canada. Pierre died in 1669 in Lauzon, across the river from Québec. He was referred to as "Le Suisse" on his burial record. Charlotte died in 1676, also in Lauzon. Four of their children are my Nth great-grandparents, some more than once. All four of my grandparents count Pierre Miville from Switzerland as one of their ancestors.

My eighth great-grandfather Jean Bernard dit Anse was born in 1638 in Diedenhofen, Holy Roman Empire (modern day Thionville in northeast France). Given that he was "called Anse" in the records, his given name was almost certainly Hans, which French-speakers would pronounce "ahns" or "ahnz." He grew up during the Siege of Thionville, and in 1659, when he was 21, the area became part of France.

By 1666 Hans was in Quebec, because it was there and then that he married Marie de Bure of Rouen, a fille du roi who was the widow of another settler. They had nine children, seven of whom had descendants, including my seventh great-grandmother Marie Bernard dit Anse.

The marriage contract has his name as "Bernard dit Ance" with "Jean" inserted. The church marriage record gives his name as Jean Bernard son of the late Jean Bernard and Catherine Fauden. His burial record, from the parish of La Visitation in Champlain (near Trois-Rivières) dated February 15, 1698, reads: "A man about 60 years old named Anse who was found frozen on Lac St Pierre (upriver from Trois-Rivières). They tried to save him, but he was frozen." (His widow died two years later.)

The original family name of my seventh great-grandfather Jean Daigle dit Lallemand was Degme or something similar. He was born in the Holy Roman Empire in 1655. According to his marriage record, he was "son of the late Georges Degme from Vienna in Lower Germany and of Marie Chauvin." "Vienna in Lower Germany" seems impossible, since "Bas-Allemagne" was an area of the lower Rhine around Dusseldorf. The Rhine valley is certainly closer to France than Vienna and seems a more likely origin point. 

In 1685 in Québec, he married Marie Anne Proteau, who was born in Poitiers. The marriage contract gives his name as "Jean Deigme dit Lallemand." The "dit Lallemand" means he was called "the German." The marriage record has his name as Jean Degme. The name somehow turned into Daigle (unrelated to a Daigle family in Acadia).

Jean and Marie Anne had two children with descendants, one of whom was my sixth great-grandfather André Daigle dit Lallemand. The "dit Lallemand" persisted through several generations as a way to identify this particular Daigle family. My second great-grandmother's name was given as Angélique Daigle dite Lallemand on her marriage record to show descent, but on her burial record it was Angélique Daigle, the name she probably went by.

My seventh great-grandfather Emmanuel Mirande was born Manoel Tavares de Miranda, which was also his father's name, in December 1658 in Santa Cruz de Graciosa, Azores islands. The baptismal record lists only his father, but the record of his marrige to Marguerite Bourgeois, daughter of settlers from central France, in Beaubassin, Acadia, gives his father's name in French transliteration as Emmanuel and his mother's as Catherine Spire. Azorean records indicate that her name was Catarina Pires de Colvilha. She was the daughter of a man who had been born in the Azores around 1605.

Manoel's paternal grandparents, my ninth great-grandparents, were Antonio da Costa Tavares from Madeira, Portugal, and Maria Alvares de Medina, who had come from Spain. Manoel/Emmanuel and Maria had four children with descendants, including my sixth great-grandmother, Madeleine Mirande Tavare. Manoel died in Acadia sometime before 1707. By the time Madeleine's husband died in 1722, he and Madeleine had left Acadia (or fled) and were living in Kamouraska on the Saint Lawrence.

My sixth great-grandfather, baptized in Montréal at age 8 with the name Louis Philippe Langlais dit Sérien, had been born Daniel Sargent in 1699, son of a Cornishman named Digory Sargent who had settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

When Daniel was 3, some Abenaki warriors raided their settlement, and Daniel's parents were killed. The Abenaki brought Daniel to Montréal, where they handed him over to colonial administrators. The baptismal record reads that the baptized person was "a little English boy named in his country Daniel Sergeant born...to the late Dickery Sergeant of [a blank was left] and Marie Oben, both Protestants." "Dit Sérien" seems to have come from a family that took him in.

In 1718 at age 18, he married Marguerite Lavoie of Rivière-Ouelle, the grand-daughter of French settlers. Rivière-Ouelle is far downriver from Québec and very far downriver from Montréal. They had four children, three of whom lived to have children of their own, including my fifth great-greandmother Marguerite Sérien dite Langloise. Louis Philippe died in 1728.

(I also have three settler ancestors named Langlois. I do not know if that indicates an ancestral connection with England.)

Most descendants of New France settlers have at least one Indigenous ancestor. My ninth great-grandmother Marie Olivier was born Ouchistauichkoue Manitouabéouich in 1624. She was born in Huron territory but might have been Algonquin (the settlers were allied with both nations). Her father Roch Manitouabéouich had converted to Catholicism. He had his daughter baptized and then brought up by his best friend, Olivier le Tardif, although she maintained ties with her birth family.

At age 20 she was married to French settler Martin Prévost. They had eight children, four of whom had descendants, including my eighth great-grandfather Jean-Baptiste Prévost. Marie was only 41 when she died.

(This ancestry does not make me an Indigenous person. My culture is and has always been French-Canadian.)

To the best of my knowledge, the rest of my ancestors came from various parts of France. The largest number came from Normandy, then Île-de-France, the province that include Paris. Many others came from an area of upper Normandy then called Perche, the small province of Aunis on the southwest coast in which New Rochelle is situated, the provinces of Poitou (Poitiers), Saintonge, Orléanais, Champagne, Anjou, Maine, Brittany, Picardy, and several others, even from the south of France.

The French language was only partly established in France during the 17th century, but it was the language of Paris and of the Bourbon kingdom. Any settlers who spoke their regional language must have learned or improved their French in the colonies of New France.

This mix of people traded in furs with Indigenous peoples, fought with Indigenous allies against common enemies (including the British), farmed the land, fished the waters, and became their own people and culture. The settlers whom the British conquered but did not defeat were neither French nor European nor Indigenous but rather Acadien and Canadien.