Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur
& Élisabeth Roy
Quick Facts: Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur
Quick Facts: Élisabeth Roy (also "Isabelle", once "Rachel")
Her own documentary biography, including the three marriage contracts read in the original, is at Élisabeth Roy →
1. Saint-Jean, December 1687
On the twentieth of December 1687 the curé Francheville wrote in the register of Saint-Jean, Île d'Orléans, that he had buried in the cemetery of that parish "Antoine le Blanc dit Jolicoeur, âgé de trente huit ans, décédé le dix-huit du mesme mois après avoir reçu les sacrements de pénitence et eucharistie." Pierre Terrien and Thomas Plante attended the burial, and both declared they could not write or sign.
Two entries above his, on the same page, in the same hand, stands another burial from that week: Marguerite Rousselot, femme de Charles Phlibot, dead on the seventeenth, aged thirty, buried the twentieth. Neither family could have known it, but the widow of the first entry would marry the widower of the second inside five months.
Registre paroissial, Saint-Jean, Île d'Orléans, December 1687: the burials of Marguerite Rousselot on the twentieth and, below her, Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur the same day. Registres photographiés au greffe de Québec.
Thirty-eight is young, and the page has often said so. It is worth being careful about how much weight that carries. The cause is not recorded — seventeenth-century curés did not write diagnoses — and a single comparison with another veteran is not a mortality rate. What the record supports is narrower and sadder: he died in the winter of his forty-third year at the outside, ten months after taking on twelve arpents of land, leaving a widow of forty-six and three living children.
Those children were Marguerite, sixteen; Joseph, fourteen; and Marie, four. Two sons were already in the ground, buried on a single January day five years before.
What follows is what the documents say, and where they disagree, they are left disagreeing.
2. Noyon — A Cathedral Town in Picardy
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Noyon — an early masterpiece of Gothic architecture, begun in 1145. This was the dominant structure of the town Antoine left as a young man.
Antoine Leblanc came from the parish of Saint-Pierre, in the diocese of Noyon, Picardy — a small fortified city on the Oise, some eighty kilometres north-east of Paris. His marriage contract of January 1670 names him "fils de Martin Le Blanc et de deffuncte Marie Flamen ses père et mère"; the parish register six days later writes the mother's name as Flaniau. We know their names because their son, an ocean away, told two clerks in the same week who they were.
Noyon was old — older than Paris in ceremonial weight. Charlemagne was crowned there in 768, Hugh Capet in 987. By Antoine's time those days were eight centuries past, but the city still carried its history in stone, and the four-towered silhouette of the cathedral was visible for miles across the flat Picard farmland. It was also the birthplace of John Calvin, though the Reformation had been suppressed in the region and by the 1640s Noyon was firmly Catholic under its bishop.
Nicolas Tassin, "Gouvernement de Noyon," copper plate map, 1634. Noyon and the Picardy country along the Oise — the landscape where Antoine spent his childhood. Senlis, where Élisabeth Roy was born, lies some sixty kilometres to the south-west.
The town he knew was still recovering from the previous century — heavily burned in 1557 during the Italian Wars — and was a modest garrison town in a region crossed by armies moving toward the Spanish Netherlands. Picardy was borderland, and the boys who grew up there grew up knowing soldiers.
No baptism for Antoine has been found in the Noyon registers. The diocesan registers have significant gaps from this period and searches under variant spellings have not located an entry. Everything we can say about when he was born comes from four later documents, and they do not agree.
The Problem of His Age
Four records bear on when he was born, and they do not agree.
| Record | Age given | Implied birth |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmation register, Québec, 24 August 1664 | 20 | c. 1644 |
| Census of 1681 | 32 | c. 1649 |
| Burial register, December 1687 | 38 | c. 1649 |
| Marriage, January 1670 | no age given | — |
Every published account gives about 1649. It is worth knowing where that comes from. Beauregard’s database states its own source outright — «né vers 1649 (rec. 1681) (sép. 1687)» — the 1681 census and the 1687 burial, and nothing else. Gagné carries the same year; so does the PRDH. All three trace back to the same two records. That is one source string, not three witnesses, and both records are of the kind where colonial ages are least trustworthy.
The confirmation register is independent of them, and it can be tested. Five leaves earlier, on 3 June 1664, the same clerk recorded a confirmation at the Hôtel-Dieu whose entries include children of families whose birth dates are documented elsewhere: Paul Augustin Juchereau, born January 1658, entered at 6; Claire Françoise Bissot, born April 1656, entered at 8; Ursule Levasseur, born February 1657, entered at 7. Three exact. This clerk was not rounding.
Which leaves the harder problem. The confirmation is dated a year before the Carignan-Salières Regiment reached New France, and the man written on the very next line is François Lauzide, whom Gagné has landing on 18 August 1665 with the Salières Company. Both cannot be right.
Three ways out, and two of them are now closed.
A namesake? Only three Antoine Leblancs appear in the PRDH or Beauregard: one married in 1752, one is this man, and one lived and died at Pont-l’Évêque in Calvados, married before 1636 and never crossed. No candidate exists — though neither database records a man who arrived, was confirmed and went home, leaving no family behind him.
The register’s “20” is loose? Not from this clerk, on this evidence.
The year is a slip for 1665? Possible, and it would resolve everything at a stroke — but the register’s own sequence argues against it. The folios run May, May, June 1664, then this page, and only afterwards does a leaf headed 1665 begin the next year’s run through August, September and November.
So the page leaves it open. On the evidence as it stands, a birth about 1644 is better supported than the about 1649 that every printed account repeats — and if that is right, Antoine was about forty-three when he died, not thirty-eight. The record that would settle it is the one that survives least well: any trace of François Lauzide in New France before August 1664.
Registre des confirmés, Québec: "Confirmez / Le 24e Aoust / 1664 / En la Paroisse." "Anthoine Leblanc, 20" is the thirty-first name in the list.
Nothing is known of Martin Leblanc and his wife beyond their names. No sibling has been identified. Whether his parents were living when he left for New France is unrecorded — only that his mother was already dead by January 1670, when he said so to a notary. He left Noyon as a young man and the town kept no trace of his going. He carried its diocese in colonial documents for the rest of his life.
3. The Regiment — Compagnie de Maximy, 1665
A soldier of the Carignan-Salières Regiment. The regiment's men wore no standard uniform on campaign in Canada; what they carried was a musket, a sword and whatever they could keep dry.
In 1665 Louis XIV sent the Carignan-Salières Regiment to New France — some twelve hundred men in twenty-four companies, the first regular troops the colony had ever seen. Their orders were to end the Mohawk war. They built the forts along the Richelieu, marched into the Iroquois country in 1666, and by 1667 had forced a peace that held for nearly twenty years.
Antoine Leblanc appears on the roll of the compagnie de Maximy. When the regiment was disbanded in 1668 its captain returned to France and the Crown offered land and provisions to any soldier who would stay. Something between four and five hundred did. They are the reason the seigneuries along the St Lawrence filled as quickly as they did, and the reason so many Québec families descend from men who arrived carrying muskets.
The compagnie de Maximy, continued — page 5 of the company list. Antoine Leblanc is among the men who stayed when the regiment was disbanded.
Two details of the record are worth having. He appears to be entered twice on the 1668 roll — once as Leblanc and once as Jolicoeur — which is a caution for anyone counting soldiers off that list. And the Maximy company was garrisoned at Sainte-Famille on Île d'Orléans, where the 1667 census finds him. That is why a Picard soldier ended up farming that particular island, and it is how he came to meet a widow of that particular parish.
One caution belongs here rather than in a footnote. The company attribution and the 1665 arrival rest on compiled lists, not on a signed engagement or a muster roll read in the original. They are consistent with everything else known about him, and they are the standard account. But the confirmation entry of August 1664 sits awkwardly against them, and until that is resolved this section is the part of his life held most lightly.
4. "Jolicoeur" — A Soldier's Name
Jolicoeur — "cheerful heart," or more literally "pretty heart." Soldiers of the period were given noms de guerre on enlistment, partly to distinguish men of the same surname in a company and partly because the army liked the habit. Others in the Maximy company carried Dampierre, Le Provençal, Gratte Lard — Fat Scraper — La Chasse, and Le Tambour.
Most such names were dropped at demobilization. Antoine's was not. It follows him through every substantial document of his life: the marriage contract of 1670, the land concession of 1687, the harvest engagement of 1674, the burial entry of December 1687, and the baptism of his son Joseph in 1673, where the curé wrote him down as "fils d'Anthoine Le Blanc dit Joly Coeur."
He never wrote it himself. In every act where the question arises — 1670, 1674, 1687 in February, 1687 at his burial — the formula is the same: a déclaré ne sçavoir escrire ny signer. The name that identified him for four decades and descended to his children was carried entirely by other people's hands.
5. A Fille du Roi from Senlis — January 1670
Élisabeth Roy had landed at Québec on 18 June 1665, one of about ninety Filles du Roi aboard the St-Jean-Baptiste. An orphan from Senlis who could not write her name, she was married within four months to Pierre Pallereau, a plowman from Villedoux some fifteen years her senior, and settled with him at Sainte-Famille on the island.
Pallereau died on 23 November 1669. The Sainte-Famille register records his burial, gives his age as forty, and adds two words the page once said were missing: mort subitement. He had died suddenly. Two weeks later his second daughter, Anne, was born and baptized on the same day. At twenty-eight Élisabeth was a widow with a two-year-old and a newborn, on an island, at the start of winter.
Eight weeks after that she contracted to marry Antoine Leblanc.
The wrapper of the contract, endorsed "20. Janvier 1669" — the year the act carries throughout, and the year that cannot be right. Greffe de Paul Vachon, 1655–1693, Archives nationales à Québec (03Q,CN301,S266), act no. 384.
The act is dated 20 January 1669, on the wrapper and again in the body, and that date is impossible on its own terms. Pierre Pallereau was alive until 23 November 1669 and the contract calls Élisabeth his widow; the wedding follows at Sainte-Famille on 26 January 1670. The printed inventory reproduces the year faithfully, so the slip belongs to the notary or his clerk, not to the index.
Earlier versions of this page explained the discrepancy as Old Style dating. That explanation is not available: France moved the start of the legal year to 1 January by the Edict of Roussillon in 1564, effective 1567, and adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582 — a century before this act. The likeliest reading is the dullest one. In the third week of January, writing the year for the first time in a fortnight, Paul Vachon wrote the one he had been writing all December.
The first leaf. Antoine appears as "fils de Martin Le Blanc et de deffuncte Marie Flamen ses père et mère, de la paroisse de Saint-Pierre… en Picardie, diocèse de Noyon"; Élisabeth as "Ysabelle Le Roy vefve de deffunct Pierre Paillereau, fille de deffunct Antoine Le Roy et de deffuncte Simone Gautier… de la ville de Senlis en Picardie." Both were then living in the parish of Sainte-Famille.
Each party came with parents et amis assembled to consent — the formula for the kin who would have stood in the room in France, improvised here out of neighbours. On Antoine's side were Gabriel Dumas, master mason, and Jean Jouanne, habitants of the island. On Élisabeth's stood Abel Turcaud and Marie Girou his wife.
Marie Girou is worth stopping on. Two years earlier she had held Élisabeth's first daughter at the font at Sainte-Famille, in a baptism where the godfather's line was left blank. Four years into the colony, with no family of her own anywhere in it, the neighbour who stood up for the child stood up for the mother.
There is also a plainer answer to how a widow of Sainte-Famille came to marry a soldier from Picardy, and it runs through his company. The Maximy company was garrisoned at Sainte-Famille, and Antoine is found in the 1667 census of that parish. When Élisabeth's second daughter Anne was baptized there on 7 December 1669 — two weeks after Pierre Pallereau's burial and six weeks before this contract — the godmother was Anne Colin, wife of Vincent Boissonneau dit Saint-Onge of the Maximy company.
The thread does not stop there. When Marguerite was baptized in July 1671 her godfather was Paul Vignault dit Laverdure, another company mate. And when Élisabeth married for the third time in May 1688, five months after Antoine's death, one of the witnesses at Saint-Jean was Jacques Bidet dit Desroussels — Antoine's company mate again, standing up at his widow's wedding. The regiment disbanded in 1668; the company did not.
The second leaf carries the property terms — and the two clauses about Marthe.
Community of property under the Coutume de Paris; neither liable for debts the other contracted before the wedding.
Douaire of 150 livres tournois préfix, or the douaire coutumier, at Élisabeth's choice.
Préciput of 100 livres tournois, reciprocal.
Before the wedding, Élisabeth was to have herself elected tutrice to the person and property of her daughter Marthe Pallereau, with a subrogé tuteur named, and an inventory taken of the community she had held with Pierre.
Marthe to be "nourrie et entretenue aux despens de la dite communauté jusqu'à ce qu'elle ayt attaint l'âge de quinze ans" — fed and maintained at the new household's expense until she turned fifteen, without diminution of her own property.
Passed at the seigneurial place of Île d'Orléans. The bride, the groom, Dumas, and Turcaud and his wife all declared they could not write or sign.
The tutelle was required. Under the Coutume de Paris a widow with minor children could not remarry until their guardianship was settled and the first community inventoried, and the contract sets that machinery out in order.
The maintenance clause was not required. It is the part of this act that tells you something about the two people in it. Antoine was about twenty-one and owned no land — his first concession is seven weeks away. Élisabeth made certain, before she married him, that her daughter would be fed out of the common purse for the next thirteen years and that the cost would not be charged against the child's own small inheritance from her father. Neither of them could read the sentence. It is in the act.
And there is a silence in it. The contract names Marthe and only Marthe. Anne — baptized six weeks earlier — appears nowhere: no guardianship, no maintenance, no mention. The Sainte-Famille register holds no burial for her, and she leaves no further trace of any kind. The fullest treatment of that question is on Élisabeth's own page; the short version is that she had almost certainly died in those six weeks.
The closing leaf: "Faict et passé au lieu seigneurial de… l'isle d'Orléans… mil six cent soixante neuf." Everyone present who was party to the act declared they could not write or sign.
Registre paroissial, Sainte-Famille, Île d'Orléans, 26 January 1670. The register names both sets of parents — giving the groom's mother as Marie Flaniau, where the contract six days earlier wrote Flamen. Witnesses: Paul Vachon, the same notary who drew the contract, and Denis Étuisse. Officiant: Père Thomas Morel.
The two spellings of his mother's name are the page's one irreducible conflict. Both records are contemporary, neither is copied from the other, and both were written down from what Antoine himself said. She was dead in France and no one in the colony had ever met her. Two clerks a week apart heard her name differently, and there is no third document to break the tie.
Élisabeth's given name behaves the same way, and the earliest document shows why. Her first marriage contract, passed before Pierre Duquet on 12 October 1665, calls her Isabelle in the appearance clause and Élisabeth in the promise clause — one woman, one hand, one afternoon. The alternation is not register-versus-notary; it starts inside a single act. What stands apart is the "Rachel le Roy" of the 1671 land sale, which is not a variant of either name in the way those two are of each other, and which appears exactly once.
6. Land on the Island — 1670–1671
Seven weeks after the wedding, Antoine had land. On 10 March 1670 Monseigneur de Laval — first bishop of Québec, and seigneur of much of Île d'Orléans — granted him a concession before the same notary who had drawn his marriage contract. It is act no. 432 of the Vachon greffe, one of a cluster the bishop issued that day to René Minaut, Pierre Mourier, Nicolas Delâge and Nicolas Duret.
Concession de Monseigneur de Laval à Anthoine le Blanc, 10 March 1670 — act no. 432. Greffe de Paul Vachon (03Q,CN301,S266), Archives nationales à Québec.
Three arpents of frontage on the St Lawrence, taken on the south side of Île d'Orléans.
Cens et rentes: twenty sols tournois per arpent of frontage, non rachetable, plus two live capons or thirty sols each — payable every year at Saint-Martin, the eleventh of November.
Conditions: to set feu et lieu on the land within the year and keep it under cultivation, on pain of the concession being void, without compensation for any building or clearing done.
Three arpents of frontage is a start, not an estate: a strip of riverbank running back toward the spine of the island, most of it standing forest. The condition to put fire and hearth on it within the year is the ordinary language of a colony that wanted farms rather than absentee titles.
The closing of act 432, with the annual dues and the obligation to clear and cultivate.
Roy, Inventaire des greffes des notaires du Régime français, Vol. II (Vachon), p. 32: "Concession de Mgr de Laval à Anthoine LeBlanc (10 mars 1670)," among several issued the same day. The printed index led to the act; the act is what the page now rests on.
Twenty months later he sold. On 13 November 1671 Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur and his wife — written in that act as Rachel le Roy — conveyed property to Guillaume Lemieux for four hundred and eighty livres tournois. The four manuscript leaves survive not in the notarial archives but in a private family's papers, the Fonds Famille Pouliot at BAnQ, which is a reminder of where colonial evidence sometimes ends up.
Why they sold, the document does not say. What is clear is that they did not leave the island. Ten years later the census finds them still on it.
But there is a gap here that this page did not previously notice, and it is worth stating rather than smoothing over. The 1671 sale describes land on the south side of the island fronting the river, charged with three livres tournois and capons payable at Saint-Martin — and three arpents of frontage at twenty sols the arpent is exactly three livres. The parcel he sold in November 1671 was almost certainly the one Laval had granted him twenty months earlier.
Yet when Berthelot granted him twelve arpents in February 1687, the act placed them adjoining «la concession dudit Le Blanc» — his own existing holding. If the 1670 land was gone in 1671, something was acquired in between, and no act for it has been found. Sixteen years of this family's working life sit in that gap. Either the 1671 sale conveyed only part of the three arpents, or there is a concession or purchase still to be located.
Vente by Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur and "Rachel le Roy" to Guillaume Lemieux, 13 November 1671, 480 livres tournois. BAnQ, Fonds Famille Pouliot, P436, S999, P13.
7. Five Children
| Name | Born | Baptized | Place | After |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marguerite | 2 Jul 1671 | 8 Jul 1671 | Ste-Famille | Godfather Paul Vignault dit Laverdure, her father's company mate. Married Nicolas Sustier dit Tranchemontagne at St-Jean, 30 Apr 1691 — her father entered as deceased. Died 31 July 1723, buried at Notre-Dame-de-Montréal, aged 50. Direct ancestor |
| Joseph | — | 15 Aug 1673 | Ste-Famille | Register writes him "fils d'Anthoine Le Blanc dit Joly Coeur". Married Marie Philibot about 1697 at St-Jean; nine children. Buried there 28 November 1741, aged 71 — the one who stayed |
| Pierre | 23 Dec 1675 | 29 Dec 1675 | Ste-Famille | Godfather Pierre Terrien, who would attend his father's burial. Died aged six |
| Antoine | 25 Oct 1678 | 29 Oct 1678 | Ste-Famille | Named for his father. Died aged three |
| Marie | 19 Aug 1683 | 22 Aug 1683 | St-Jean | Four years old when her father died. Married Jean Bissonnette (contract 11 Jan 1709), then Jean Coulombe at St-Michel de Bellechasse, 20 Apr 1716. Buried 18 March 1750 at Berthier-sur-Mer |
The 1681 census still finds them at Sainte-Famille, and gives the household as Anthoine Leblanc, 32, and Elisabeth le Roy sa femme, 40, with four children entered beneath them — Marguerite 10, Joseph 7, Pierre 6, Anthoine 3 — and four arpents en valeur.
Recensement de 1681, page 325. Four arpents en valeur; the columns for arms and livestock are empty, where the neighbouring households on the same page carry muskets, cattle and up to fifteen arpents.
Two things about that entry cut against how it has been read. The household's figures are thin — four arpents, and nothing at all under arms or bestiaux. And the list of children is incomplete: Marthe Pallereau is not in it, though she was thirteen, alive, and under Antoine's roof by the terms of his own marriage contract until she turned fifteen. She married six years later. Whether she had been placed out in service, as girls of that age often were, or was simply passed over, the entry is not a reliable account of who was in that family — and it should not be used to establish who was missing from it.
8. The Coldest Day — 5 January 1682
Some time in the twelve months after that census the family moved across the island to Saint-Jean. Every record after it comes from that parish, and the first of them is this one.
On 5 January 1682 the curé of Saint-Jean buried Pierre Leblanc, aged six, and Antoine Leblanc, aged three, in a single entry. Pierre Rondeau and Nicolas Guillemet attended. The cause is not given. The register there writes their mother's surname as Vervié — a fifth form, after Le Roy, Isabelle, Élisabeth, and the Rachel of the 1671 sale.
Simultaneous deaths of siblings almost always mean an infectious disease moving through a household, and in January on the island there was nowhere for a family to go. One year earlier the census had counted four children under that roof. After this there were two, until Marie was born the following summer.
Registre paroissial, Saint-Jean, Île d'Orléans, 5 January 1682: the burial of Pierre and Antoine Leblanc, brothers, aged six and three.
9. Twenty-Five Livres, a Pot of Brandy, and Five Salted Eels
On 13 August 1674, in Pierre Duquet's study at Québec, Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur hired out his own labour for the harvest.
He undertook to couper, serrer et engranger — cut, bind and barn — all the grain then standing on François du Mats's holding on the island, Indian corn excepted, and to see that none of it was lost through his fault or negligence. His pay, due as soon as the grain was in: twenty-five livres tournois, a pot of brandy, and five salted eels.
Engagement d'Anthoine le Blanc dit Jolicoeur à François du Mats, 13 August 1674. Greffe de Pierre Duquet de la Chesnaye, 1663–1687, Archives nationales à Québec (03Q,CN301,S95). He declared he could not write or sign.
This page previously carried the engagement as uncertain — "identity uncertain, common name" — on the strength of the printed index entry, which gives only "Antoine Leblanc." The act itself is far more specific. It names him "Anthoine le Blanc dit Jolicoeur, habitant de l'Isle d'Orléans." The dit name and the residence together make a namesake a strained reading.
Four years married, with three or four arpents cleared and two small children, he was selling his own harvest labour to a neighbour and taking part of the price in fish. The census columns say four arpents; this act says what four arpents meant.
10. The Last Concession — February 1687
Five years after burying his sons, Antoine took on land for the second and last time. On 15 February 1687, at the seigneurial manor of the comté, he received a concession of twelve arpents of frontage on the St Lawrence — four times what Laval had granted him in 1670, and adjoining the land he already held.
The seigneur was François Berthelot, conseiller du Roy and secrétaire des commandements de Madame la Dauphine, who had held Île d'Orléans since 1675 under the name île et comté de Saint-Laurent. He never set foot in it. The grant was made in his name by Louis Rouer de Villeray, premier conseiller au Conseil Souverain.
The wrapper: "Contract de Concession de Anthoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur et sa femme… 15 Février 1687 / Concession par Fs. Berthelot à Ant. Leblanc dit Jolicoeur." Greffe de Paul Vachon (03Q,CN301,S266), act no. 1137.
The first leaf names the grantee "Anthoine Le Blanc dit Jolicoeur, habitant de la paroisse de Saint-Jean-Baptiste audit comté" and the grant as "le nombre de douze arpents de terre de front sur le fleuve Saint-Laurent."
But the twelve arpents were not open land, and this is the part of the act that changes what it means.
The fourth leaf: the thirty livres of arrears, and the sentence of the bailli that had returned the land to the domain.
Twelve arpents of frontage on the St Lawrence, in the isle et comté Saint-Laurent, paroisse de Saint-Jean-Baptiste, adjoining Antoine's own existing concession, fronting the river and backing on the road that runs the length of the island from point to point.
Cens et rentes, at the same rate as 1670: twenty sols tournois per arpent of frontage, twelve deniers of cens per arpent, and two live capons or thirty sols each for the whole concession — payable yearly at Saint-Martin.
The land had been forfeited. It had belonged to a man since dead — the act names him, and the reading of his surname is not secure at the available resolution — and had been réunie au domaine of the comté by sentence of the bailli. The act cites that judgment with its date left blank.
Thirty livres tournois of unpaid arrears came with it, payable in two instalments of fifteen — at Michaelmas 1687 and Michaelmas 1688 — to Louis de Niort, sieur de la Noraye, receiver of the domain's dues for the comté.
Further obligations: to grind his grain at the seigneurial mill, wind or water; to leave a road fifteen feet wide on each side and along the river; to fence if need be, failing which he could claim nothing for damage done by his neighbours' cattle; and the seigneur's retrait on any sale.
Passed at the seigneurial manor before Joseph Bourneau and Joseph Lesarge. Antoine declared he could not write or sign.
Note what the act assumes: that Antoine already held land here for the new grant to adjoin. What that earlier holding was, and when he got it, is the gap described in section 6.
So the last land is not a reward and not a fresh start. It is a dead neighbour's farm, taken back by the seigneurie for unpaid dues and handed on to the man next door along with the debt. Antoine was about thirty-eight, or forty-three, and he took it.
He had ten months. The first fifteen livres fell due at Michaelmas 1687 and he lived to see it. The second fell due at Michaelmas 1688, nine months after he was buried and four months after his widow had married again.
The closing: "Faict et passé au lieu domenial du dit comté, le quinzième février l'an mil six cent quatre-vingt-sept… Et a le dit Le Blanc déclaré ne sçavoir escrire ny signer."
Roy, Inventaire, Vol. II (Vachon), p. 77: "Concession de François Berthelot à Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur (15 février 1687)." The index gives the date and the parties; the five leaves give the story.
11. After Antoine
Élisabeth was forty-six and a widow for the second time. Her marriage contract with Antoine had made them "uns et communs en biens meubles et conquests immeubles", so the twelve arpents — acquired during the marriage — were hers by half, whatever the parchment said, and so was what was owed on them. The concession never names her. The wrapper calls it a contract for "Anthoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur et sa femme," but the body names him alone.
On 25 April 1688 she contracted her third marriage, before the notary Claude Auber, act no. 502. On 16 May she married Charles Phlibot at Saint-Jean — the notary writes him Fribot, the parish register Phlibot, the same man twice spelled. He had buried Marguerite Rousselot on the same December day Antoine was buried, and he brought five children of his own.
The 1688 contract obliged the new community to feed and raise those five to the age of fifteen: the identical clause, in the identical form, that Élisabeth had obtained for her own daughter from Antoine eighteen years earlier. She had now been on both sides of that sentence, and could read neither.
Île d'Orléans. Antoine Leblanc arrived on it in his twenties and never left it; Élisabeth Roy lived her whole colonial life between its two parishes, Sainte-Famille and Saint-Jean.
Marguerite married Nicolas Sustier dit Tranchemontagne on 30 April 1691, three and a half years after her father's death; the register enters him as deceased. Through her the line runs into the Souliere series. Élisabeth was last recorded alive on 11 January 1709, named in the marriage contract of her youngest daughter Marie — some twenty-one years a widow of Antoine, and thirty-nine years after she had married him in a winter contract that got the year wrong.
12. How This Biography Was Built
This page was rebuilt in full in September 2026 against the original notarial acts. Where earlier versions rested on the printed Inventaire des greffes — a nineteenth-century finding aid that gives dates and parties and nothing else — the narrative now rests on five acts read leaf by leaf in the Vachon and Duquet greffes at BAnQ, plus the confirmation register, the parish registers of Sainte-Famille and Saint-Jean, and the censuses of 1681.
A finding aid is not a second witness to the act it indexes. Where the index and the act agree, that is not corroboration; the index copies the act. Where they disagree, the act governs.
What Changed in This Rebuild
The marriage contract survives. This page previously said only the répertoire entry did. Vachon act no. 384 is four leaves and is reproduced above.
Pierre Pallereau's death is recorded — 23 November 1669, "mort subitement" — not "presumed" and not "unrecorded."
The Old Style explanation is withdrawn. France moved the year start to 1 January in 1564 and went Gregorian in 1582. The 1669 on the contract is a scribal slip.
The confirmation is dated 1664, not 1669, which breaks the birth-year arithmetic and is now carried as an open conflict rather than reconciled.
The 1674 engagement is his, on the strength of the dit name and residence in the act.
The 1687 concession was forfeited land carrying a debt, not a simple grant.
Marguerite was sixteen at her father's death, not eighteen; Élisabeth was forty-six, not forty-seven.
"Fribault" is withdrawn — the documented forms are Fribot, Phlibot and Flibotte.
A Y-DNA haplogroup and a descendant estimate have been removed from the quick facts. R1b-M269 does come from testing of descendants, but it is the base-level western European clade carried by most French-descended men and says nothing about this man in particular; the descendant figure is a database projection rather than a finding.
The birth year is now argued, not assumed. The about-1649 of every printed account traces to two records only — the 1681 census and the 1687 burial. The confirmation register is independent of them and has been tested against children of known birth date. See section 2.
A sixteen-year gap in the landholding has been identified and stated rather than smoothed over. See section 6.
What remains unfound. Antoine's baptism at Noyon: the diocesan registers have gaps, searched, not found. The sentence of the bailli that returned the Casquet holding to the domain: not in the Vachon greffe, because a judgment is not a notarial act — it belongs to the judicial records of the bailliage du comté Saint-Laurent, a separate fonds. Any quittance for the thirty livres of arrears: searched around both Michaelmas due dates and in the greffe indexes, not found, and probably never notarised, since annual cens et rentes were receipted in the seigneurie's own account books rather than before a notary. The baptism register page for Marie Leblanc, 1683. And any act conveying the land Antoine held between 1671 and 1687. These are recorded as negative findings with their extent stated, not as gaps in research.
Research and narrative by Mary Hamall Morales, Storyline Genealogy. Primary sources accessed through Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, PRDH-IGD (Université de Montréal), FamilySearch and Library and Archives Canada. Citations follow Evidence Explained, 3rd ed. (Mills, 2015).
The Documents
Notarial Acts, Read in the Original
Parish and Civil Registers
Finding Aids and Context
Key Dates
Sources & Citations
Notarial Acts (read in the original)
- Marriage contract, 20 January 1669 [recte 1670]: Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur & Isabelle Le Roy, act no. 384. Greffe de Paul Vachon, 1655–1693. Archives nationales à Québec, Fonds Cour supérieure, District judiciaire de Québec, Greffes de notaires (03Q,CN301,S266). BAnQ numérique doc. 4215635, images 03Q_CN301S266P_1382–1385.
- Concession, 10 March 1670: Mgr François de Laval to Anthoine le Blanc, act no. 432. Same greffe, images 03Q_CN301S266P_1549–1550.
- Engagement, 13 August 1674: Anthoine le Blanc dit Jolicoeur to François du Mats. Greffe de Pierre Duquet de la Chesnaye, 1663–1687 (03Q,CN301,S95). BAnQ numérique doc. 5362655, image 03Q_CN301S95P_01729.
- Concession, 15 February 1687: François Berthelot to Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur, act no. 1137. Greffe de Paul Vachon (03Q,CN301,S266). BAnQ numérique doc. 4215637, images 03Q_CN301S266P_4519–4523.
- Sale of land, 13 November 1671: Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur & "Rachel le Roy" to Guillaume Lemieux, 480 livres tournois. BAnQ, Fonds Famille Pouliot, P436, S999, P13.
- Marriage contract, 12 October 1665 (Élisabeth's first): Pierre Pallereau & Isabelle Le Roy, act no. 153. Greffe de Pierre Duquet (03Q,CN301,S95). BAnQ numérique doc. 5362654, images 03Q_CN301S95P_00457–00459.
- Marriage contract, 25 April 1688 (Élisabeth's third): Charles Fribot & Elizabeth Le Roy, act no. 502. Greffe de Claude Auber, 1650–1692 (03Q,CN301,S4). BAnQ numérique doc. 3781762, images 03Q_CN301S4P_1237–1239.
Registers and Census
- Confirmation, 24 August 1664: "Anthoine Leblanc, 20," entry 31. Registre des confirmés, Québec.
- Marriage, 26 January 1670: Sainte-Famille, Île d'Orléans. Parents named; witnesses Paul Vachon and Denis Étuisse; officiant Père Thomas Morel.
- Burial of Pierre Pallereau, 23 November 1669: Sainte-Famille. Age 40; "mort subitement."
- Children's baptisms, 1671–1683: Sainte-Famille and Saint-Jean, Île d'Orléans.
- Joint burial, 5 January 1682: Pierre and Antoine Leblanc, Saint-Jean. Witnesses Pierre Rondeau and Nicolas Guillemet.
- Burial, 20 December 1687: Antoine Leblanc dit Jolicoeur, Saint-Jean, age 38, died the eighteenth. Witnesses Pierre Terrien and Thomas Plante; curé Francheville. Same page: burial of Marguerite Rousselot, wife of Charles Phlibot, age 30.
- Census of 1681: Comté de Saint-Laurent, page 325. Library and Archives Canada, MG1-G1, vol. 460.
Finding Aids and Compiled Sources
- Roy, Pierre-Georges. Inventaire des greffes des notaires du Régime français. Québec: R. Lefebvre, Éditeur officiel du Québec, 1942, 28 vols. Vol. II (Paul Vachon), pp. 29, 32, 77; Vol. II (Pierre Duquet), p. 154. Collections de BAnQ. A finding aid derived from the acts, not an independent witness to them.
- Répertoire manuscrit du greffe de Claude Auber, p. 59.
- Beauregard, Denis. "Genealogy of the French in North America," entries [1548] and [4275].
- PRDH-IGD, Université de Montréal. Database fields are the PRDH's reading of a record, not a transcription of it; names are cited via the card and ages only from the register.
- Gagné, Peter J. King's Daughters and Founding Mothers: The Filles du Roi, 1663–1673.
- Mills, Elizabeth Shown. Evidence Explained. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2015.
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