Finding an Italian Ancestor in French-Canadian Research
Finding an Italian Ancestor in French-Canadian Research
When you're deep in French-Canadian genealogy—scrolling through parish registers written in faded brown ink, tracing Sylvestres and Lesages through the seigneuries of the St. Lawrence—the last thing you expect to find is an Italian. But that's exactly what happened when I followed the Soulière line back to its origins in the late 1600s and discovered a soldier whose dit name, Lepiedmontois, was not a geographic marker of a French province. It was a flag planted in the record by a man from Racconigi, a small town in the Piedmont region of Italy, south of Turin, in the shadow of the Alps.
His name was Jean Bernardin Lesage. And his story—how he ended up in a French colony where over 95 percent of the settlers were French—is both an anomaly in genealogical research and a reminder that the founding population of New France was never as homogeneous as the standard histories suggest.
How Rare Is an Italian Ancestor in New France?
The short answer: extraordinarily rare. Out of the approximately 10,000 founding immigrants who settled permanently in New France before 1760, historians estimate that over 95 percent came from France—primarily from the northwestern provinces of Normandy, Brittany, Poitou, and the Île-de-France. The remaining five percent included a scattering of individuals from the British Isles, the German states, the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal, and the Italian peninsula.
Most Italians who appeared in colonial records were temporary visitors: high-ranking explorers like Enrico Tonti (Henri de Tonty), the Neapolitan officer who became La Salle's chief lieutenant and is known as the "Father of Arkansas"; missionaries like Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, the Jesuit who arrived as early as 1642; or political figures like Cardinal Mazarin, who influenced colonial policy from Paris but never set foot in the colony. These men left their mark on history, but they didn't stay. They didn't marry local women, clear land, or raise families in the Canadian wilderness.
Jean Bernardin Lesage did all of those things. He married, fathered twelve children, settled at Neuville and then L'Assomption, and lived to the age of ninety-one. He was not a visitor. He was a Canadien—one of the rarest kind.
What the Dit Name Tells Us
In French-Canadian genealogy, the dit name is one of the most revealing tools in a researcher's arsenal. Short for "called" or "said," it was a nickname or alias that became legally interchangeable with the original surname. For soldiers, these noms de guerre—war names—served a practical purpose: when you have a company full of Jean-Baptistes and Pierres, you need another way to tell them apart.
Geographic dit names were among the most common. A soldier from the province of Champagne became "Champagne." A man from Berry became "Berry." The system was so pervasive that today, many Québécois families whose surnames are provincial names—Champagne, Picard, Languedoc—owe those names not to geography but to a seventeenth-century military roll call.
Jean Bernardin's dit name was Lepiedmontois: "the Piedmontese." Not from a French province, but from the Piedmont region of what is now northern Italy. His marriage record of 1686, penned at Neuville, identifies his origin explicitly: "Paroisse de Sancti-Maria, de la ville de Raconis, Archevêché de Turin, Piémont." The Parish of Santa Maria, in the town of Racconigi, Archdiocese of Turin, Piedmont.
For a genealogist, this kind of specificity in a colonial record is gold. It tells us not just the country of origin, but the parish, the town, and the religious jurisdiction. It's the seventeenth-century equivalent of a GPS pin.
"Paroisse de Sancti-Maria, de la ville de Raconis, Archevêché de Turin, Piémont"
How a Piedmontese Soldier Ended Up in New France
Jean Bernardin did not arrive with the famous Carignan-Salières Regiment—that force had come and gone two decades earlier, in 1665. He came instead with the Troupes de la Marine (Compagnies Franches de la Marine), a newer kind of military force that represented a fundamental shift in French colonial strategy.
The Carignan-Salières had been a temporary expeditionary regiment sent to fight a specific war against the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). When the campaign ended, the regiment was disbanded: about 400 of its 1,200 men stayed as settlers, while the rest returned to France. The Troupes de la Marine, by contrast, were permanent colonial regulars. Answerable to the Ministry of the Navy rather than the Ministry of War, these soldiers were sent beginning in 1683 to defend New France on an ongoing basis. Between 1683 and 1688, thirty-five companies—over 1,400 soldiers—were dispatched to protect a colony of just 10,300 souls.
This was not unusual military recruitment. In seventeenth-century Europe, armies were multinational by nature. The French crown routinely drew soldiers from allied or neighboring territories: the Swiss cantons, the German states, the Spanish Netherlands, and—crucially for our story—the Duchy of Savoy, which controlled the Piedmont region. The Duchy maintained close diplomatic and military ties with France, and Piedmontese soldiers frequently served in French units.
Jean Bernardin's marriage record places him in the Company of Monsieur de Muy. The witnesses at his 1686 wedding included Joseph Caba, Lieutenant of the Company, and the Company Captain himself, M. Demuy, who had formally granted Jean Bernardin permission to marry. In the French military system, a soldier needed his commanding officer's consent to wed—and the captain's presence at the ceremony was both a legal necessity and a social endorsement.
Racconigi, from the Theatrum Sabaudiae (2nd ed., 1726). Jean Bernardin's hometown in the Province of Cuneo, known for its Savoy royal castle.
Italy in 1700. Racconigi lies just south of Turin in the Duchy of Savoy. From The Public Schools Historical Atlas, ed. C. Colbeck, 1905.
Why Integration Was Seamless—and Why It Matters
One of the most striking aspects of Jean Bernardin's story is how completely he integrated into colonial society. Because both France and Italy were Catholic Latin cultures, the religious and linguistic barriers that might have separated a Protestant German or an English-speaking settler simply didn't exist. The Piedmontese dialect was close enough to French that a soldier with a good ear could become functionally bilingual within a few years of service. And in a colony desperate for population growth, any man willing to marry, clear land, and raise children was welcome regardless of where he was born.
His dit name, "Lepiedmontois," remained the only visible marker of his foreign origin. In some records he appears as "Lesage Lepiedmontois," in others as "Lesage dit Piedmontois," and in still others as simply "Jean Bernardin Le Sage"—the Italian identity fading a little more with each generation of documents. By the time his grandchildren were being baptized, the Piedmontese connection was a footnote. The family was fully Canadien.
This matters for genealogists because it means Italian ancestors in French-Canadian records are invisible unless you know what to look for. Without the dit name, Jean Bernardin would appear in every database as simply another Lesage—French by assumption, lost in a sea of common surnames. The dit name is the thread that, when pulled, unravels the entire assumption of a purely French founding population.
The "Champagne" Bride
On 8 January 1686, Jean Bernardin married Marie Barbe Sylvestre at Neuville—the parish of her father, Nicolas Sylvestre dit Champagne, a veteran of the Carignan-Salières Regiment who had arrived aboard L'Aigle d'Or in 1665. The marriage joined two military lineages: the father a Carignan soldier from the French province of Champagne, the groom a Marine soldier from the Italian region of Piedmont.
Marie Barbe was just fourteen years old—young by modern standards, but not uncommon in a colony where population growth was a matter of national policy. Her mother, Barbe Neveu, was the granddaughter of Anne Ledet, one of the earliest women recruited to populate New France. Three generations of colonial women—the pioneer grandmother, the soldier's daughter, the Italian soldier's bride—bound together by the demographic imperatives of a fragile frontier colony.
Together, Jean Bernardin and Marie Barbe would have twelve children, born between 1690 and 1713. They settled first at Neuville, in the Seigneurie de Dombourg, where the baptism records consistently name both parents and often include grandparents Nicolas Sylvestre and Barbe Neveu as witnesses. Later, the family moved to L'Assomption, establishing the Lesage presence in the Lanaudière region that continues to this day.
Église Saint-François-de-Sales, Neuville. The parish where Jean Bernardin married Marie Barbe Sylvestre in 1686.
Les concessions de la seigneurie de Neuville. The Sylvestre farm was in the first row of lots along the St. Lawrence.
What This Means for Your Research
If you're researching French-Canadian ancestry and you encounter a dit name that doesn't match any French province or region, pay attention. It may be the key to discovering a non-French ancestor hiding in plain sight. The dit system that was designed for military convenience also preserved, almost accidentally, the geographic origins of men who would otherwise have been absorbed into the homogeneous mass of "French" settlers.
Here's what to look for:
Marriage records are the richest source. In New France, marriage records typically include the groom's place of origin, his parents' names, his military company, and the name of the officer who granted permission to marry. Jean Bernardin's 1686 marriage record gave us Racconigi, the Archdiocese of Turin, the Company of de Muy, and the names of both the lieutenant and captain as witnesses. No other single document provides this density of information.
The dit name is your signal. Geographic dit names like "Champagne," "Picard," or "Languedoc" point to French provinces. But "Piedmontois," "Flamand" (Flemish), "Langlois" (the Englishman), or "Lallemand" (the German) point to foreign origins. These are your anomalies—and anomalies are where the best stories hide.
Don't assume French. The founding population of New France included soldiers recruited from across Europe. The Duchy of Savoy, the Swiss cantons, the German states, the Spanish Netherlands—all contributed men to the French colonial military. A "French" surname in a Quebec record may mask Italian, Swiss, German, or Flemish origins.
Check the PRDH database. The Programme de recherche en démographie historique at the Université de Montréal is the gold standard for French-Canadian genealogical research. It tracks individuals across baptism, marriage, and burial records and often includes notes on immigrant status and origins that aren't visible in the original parish registers.
The Documentary Biography
Jean Bernardin's full story—including 53 primary source documents, 12 children's baptism records, historic maps, and the complete narrative of his journey from Racconigi to L'Assomption—is told in our documentary biography, part of The Soulière Line series.
The Piedmontese Legacy
Jean Bernardin Lesage dit Lepiedmontois died on 13 April 1748 at L'Assomption, at the remarkable age of approximately ninety-one years. His burial record, signed at L'Assomption parish, marked the end of a life that had spanned nearly a century—from the Piedmontese plains to the Canadian frontier. His wife Marie Barbe had preceded him by eleven years, buried at L'Assomption on 6 April 1759 as "Veuve Lesage."
Today, most Lesage families in the Lanaudière region of Quebec trace their roots back to this one Italian soldier and his "Champagne" bride. His descendants number in the hundreds of thousands—an entire branch of the Québécois family tree rooted in a town most of them have never heard of, in a country most of them never think to search.
He had crossed the Alps and the Atlantic, traded the Piedmontese plains for the Canadian wilderness, and built a family whose descendants would fill entire parishes. From Santa Maria in Racconigi to L'Assomption on the St. Lawrence—a journey of five thousand miles and ninety-one years.
And it all started with a dit name.
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