Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune: The Soldier from Nevers
Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune
The Soldier from Nevers
He was born around 1641 in the diocese of Nevers, in the old province of Nivernais — a landlocked corner of central France known for its river crossings, its ironworks, and its distance from everything maritime. He would spend the last thirty-five years of his life on the edge of a continent he could not have imagined from Nevers.
Nothing survives from his French years. No baptism record has been located. His parents are unknown. His early life before the army is a complete blank. What the documents establish is this: by 1665, he was a soldier — a member of the Carignan-Salières Regiment, Company of Contrecoeur — and he was sailing for New France.
The Carignan-Salières Regiment was the largest organized military force France had ever sent to the colony. More than eleven hundred men in twenty companies arrived in the summer and fall of 1665, dispatched by Louis XIV to put an end to the Iroquois raids that had paralyzed French settlement for a generation. The regiment's mission was to build forts up the Richelieu River, establish a line of defense, and force the Iroquois to the treaty table.
The harbour of La Rochelle, ca. 1700. Philibert departed from La Rochelle aboard La Paix on 31 May 1665, arriving at Québec on 19 August 1665 — an eighty-day crossing.
Engraving by Auline, ca. 1700 · Public domain
Plan des forts faicts par le Régiment Carignan Salières. Philibert served in the Company of Contrecoeur and helped construct Fort Ste-Thérèse — a double palisade with walls fifteen pieds high.
Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domainPhilibert Couillaud — or Couillaut, or Couillat, or Coulleau, depending on which clerk was writing — sailed in the company of Contrecoeur. He was perhaps twenty-four years old. He could not read. He could not write. He was one of fewer than thirty settlers who would ever come to New France from the diocese of Nevers in the entire period from 1650 to 1750, which makes him a statistical rarity in the archives of colonial Quebec even before a single document bears his name.
The regiment's campaigns against the Iroquois were swift but largely inconclusive. What proved more consequential than the military campaigns was the policy that followed: Governor Talon and Intendant Frontenac offered land grants and incentives to soldiers who would remain in the colony after their discharge. Roughly a third of the regiment did. Philibert was among them.
Confirmed by a Bishop
The most important sentence ever written about Philibert Couillaud contains nine words: "Philbert Couilliau de Nevers" — and it was written not by a notary taking down a debt, not by a court clerk recording a lawsuit, but by a bishop's secretary registering a confirmation. It is the only document in the entire research file that identifies his origin in a contemporary hand, written while he was alive, by someone who had his word for it.
On 21 May 1669 — four years after his arrival in New France, three years after the forts were built, two years after his first appearance in the Montreal archives — Philibert stood before Bishop François de Montmorency-Laval in the chapel of Fort Chambly and received the sacrament of confirmation alongside eight other soldiers of the Carignan-Salières Regiment.
The register entry is brief and precise. It lists nine names. Philibert's appears fourth: Philbert Couilliau de Nevers. Three words. Diocese of Nevers. Nivernais. Central France.
Confirmation register, Saint-Joseph de Chambly, 21 May 1669. The entry "Philbert Couilliau de Nevers" appears fourth in the list. He is the only soldier from the diocese of Nevers in this group.
PRDH-IGD, record #403509 · Saint-Joseph de Chambly
PRDH-IGD Confirmation Card #403509. Origin recorded as NEVERS. Rank 05 among the nine confirmed. MRC: La Vallée-du-Richelieu / Montérégie.
Programme de recherche en démographie historique, Université de MontréalThis record carries extraordinary evidentiary weight precisely because it was made in his own era, by an institutional authority, in a context that had no reason to misrepresent his origins. The bishop's secretary asked where each man was from. Philibert said Nevers. It was written down. That is the record.
It is also the record that definitively silences the fraudulent noble pedigree that has confused researchers for generations. For decades, some genealogical sources — and too many online databases — have placed Philibert as a son of one Bernard de Laroque, connecting him to a southern French noble family and an entirely fabricated aristocratic lineage. This fiction was invented by Robert de Roquebrune, a twentieth-century novelist and archivist who constructed a pedigree for his own family without evidentiary foundation.
The fabricated Bernard de Laroque lineage has no primary document to support it — not a single act in French or Canadian archives identifies Philibert as the son of Bernard. Robert de Roquebrune's invention persists in online databases and has been copied from tree to tree. The 1669 confirmation register contradicts it directly. A man confirmed at Chambly in 1669 as "de Nevers" did not come from southern French nobility. His origins are plain: diocese of Nevers, parents unknown. The research stops there. Inventing a connection to satisfy the appetite for aristocratic descent is genealogical fiction.
The First Document: Rocbrune
Two years after his arrival — before the confirmation at Chambly, before his settlement at Contrecoeur, before any of the story that follows — Philibert appears for the first time in a civil document. It is a land sale before Royal Notary Bénigne Basset at Ville-Marie, on the Côte-Saint-Martin of Île de Montréal. The date is 1667. And in it, for the first time in any surviving record, someone calls him Rocbrune.
The document records the transfer of a property on the Côte-Saint-Martin between several parties, grouping a cluster of Carignan-Salières soldiers as a collective unit. Page two contains the line that enters the research file as the earliest evidence of his dit name: "Aux Nommés Rocbrune, le Vallon" — meaning the named men Rocbrune and le Vallon, two soldiers identified by their dit names rather than their given surnames.
Opening page of the 1667 land sale, notary Bénigne Basset, Côte-Saint-Martin, Île de Montréal. Among the Carignan soldiers named in the transaction.
BAnQ, Greffe Bénigne Basset · 1667
"Aux Nommés Rocbrune, le Vallon" — the first recorded use of Philibert's dit name, eight years before his marriage, written in 1667 by Royal Notary Bénigne Basset.
BAnQ, Greffe Bénigne Basset · 1667
Payment terms: 470 livres tournois. The document places Philibert alongside other soldiers of the Company of Contrecoeur, two years before his confirmation at Chambly.
BAnQ, Greffe Bénigne Basset · 1667The dit name Rocbrune — from the Occitan roc brun, a rocky height or dark rock — is a toponymic nickname, the kind assigned to men from places with recognizable landscape features, or to men whose bearing or coloring suggested the name. Whether it referred to somewhere in Nivernais, or whether it was an informal nickname given to him in the regiment, cannot be determined. What is certain is that by 1667 it was already his standard identifier in official documents — not a name he acquired in Contrecoeur, not a name that evolved later. It was there from the beginning.
This matters methodologically. The name would eventually become Roquebrune in formal documents, then Larocque in the next generation, and then Larock, Rock, Roque, and a dozen other variants as the surname traveled west and south across a continent. But it started here, in 1667, spelled Rocbrune, on a land sale on the Côte-Saint-Martin of Île de Montréal, before anything else had happened.
A Man Takes Root
At some point between 1669 and 1675, Philibert Couillaud moved from the military zone of the lower Richelieu to the Seigneurie de Contrecoeur, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. He did not come alone to this empty country — he came as one of a cluster of veterans who took up land grants in the seigneury after their discharge. The seigneur was Anthoine de Pecaudy de Contrecoeur, the same man from whom Philibert would later purchase his own concession. The community was small, new, and heavily dependent on the mutual labor of neighbors who had recently been soldiers together.
The document that proves his presence in Contrecoeur by 1675 is not a land grant or a tax record. It is a construction contract for a chapel.
On 1 December 1675, a master carpenter named Jean Duval and a settler named Antoine Emery dit Coderre contracted before a notary for the construction of Contrecoeur's first parish chapel. The contract specifies dimensions, materials, and payment. And among the witnesses whose presence validates the legal transaction is: Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune.
Church construction contract, Contrecoeur, 1 December 1675 — Philibert Couillaud as witness. The chapel contracted here on 1 December 1675 is almost certainly the chapel in which he married Catherine Laporte in the same period. The same community that built the chapel performed the marriages it would house.
BAnQ, notarial records · Contrecoeur, 1 December 1675The timing is not coincidental. The same document that places Philibert in Contrecoeur on 1 December 1675 almost certainly places him there at precisely the moment his marriage to Catherine Laporte was being arranged. Catholic canon law of the period established twelve as the canonical age for a girl's marriage. Catherine Laporte dit Saint-Georges had been baptized on 12 October 1663 at Boucherville. She turned twelve on 12 October 1675 — seven weeks before the chapel contract was signed. The fall of 1675 is the earliest moment the marriage could have occurred. The chapel they witnessed being contracted in December 1675 is almost certainly the chapel where their marriage was performed.
No marriage contract has ever been found. No marriage register entry survives. But the chapel contract is evidence of a kind: it places Philibert in the right place, at the right time, in the right company, to begin the life the 1681 census will document six years later.
Baptism of Catherine Laporte dit Saint-Georges, 12 October 1663, Boucherville. She turned twelve — the canonical age for marriage — on 12 October 1675, seven weeks before Philibert witnessed the chapel construction contract.
Boucherville parish register · PRDH-IGD
PRDH-IGD Baptism Card for Catherine Laporte dit Saint-Georges. Father: Jacques de Laporte dit Saint-Georges. Mother: Nicole Leblanc. Baptized at Boucherville, 12 October 1663.
Programme de recherche en démographie historiqueA Community of Witnesses
In the space of five months, between September 1679 and February 1680, Philibert Couillaud appears in three separate notarial acts before two different notaries — as a witness, as a buyer, and as a witness again. These documents, discovered after years of research, reveal something the later obligations and census could only imply: by 1679, more than a year before the first surviving census, Philibert was an established, trusted, and legally recognized member of the Contrecoeur community.
To serve as a notarial witness was not a casual matter. It required that you be known and identifiable — an adult male settler of established residence, whose signature (or mark) would bind a document in law. The notary called you specifically. You came. You witnessed.
Philibert was called twice in five months by notary Pierre Mesnard. Between those two witness appearances, he appeared before Royal Notary Antoine Adhémar to make the most consequential transaction of his life.
Annulment of a prior sale contract between Nicolas Bonnain dit St-Martin and Louis Jean dit Lafontaine, before notary Pierre Mesnard, Contrecoeur, 8 September 1679. Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune appears as a formal witness alongside Claude Jaudoin. The document notes that neither the parties nor the witnesses could write or sign: "ni lesdites parties ne savoir écrire ni signé." Philibert marks with an X — the same mark that will appear on the 1688 obligation, twelve years later.
Pierre Mesnard notarial records, Seigneurie de Contrecoeur · BAnQ · 8 September 1679Three months after witnessing that annulment, in February 1680, Philibert went to see Royal Notary Antoine Adhémar on a matter of his own. He was buying land. On 12 February 1680, Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune purchased a concession of sixty arpents from the Seigneur de Contrecoeur himself — Anthoine de Pecaudy, Escuyer — for thirty livres payable at Christmas. The concession measured two arpents of river frontage by thirty arpents in depth, fronting the St. Lawrence.
This document resolves a question that had been listed as open research for years: where did Philibert's land come from? The 1681 census records him with five arpents under cultivation. Five arpents cleared in thirteen months, from sixty arpents of raw concession purchased in February 1680, is exactly right.
Certified transcription of the land concession, Adhémar No. 481, certified by Prothonotary É.Z. Massicotte, 8 January 1942. Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune purchases 60 arpents from Seigneur de Contrecoeur for 30 livres. Bordered by Pierre Favro dit Dulaurier. Neither Philibert nor co-witness Jean Mazo dit St-Martin could sign.
Adhémar notarial records, No. 481 · BAnQ · 12 February 1680
The original handwritten concession deed, Adhémar No. 481. An arrow points to the word Laroque — written in the hand of notary Antoine Adhémar. This is the earliest known instance of the abbreviated form of the dit name that would become the permanent family surname. Larocque did not emerge only in the next generation: it appears in official notarial usage in Philibert's own lifetime, on his own concession deed, in 1680.
Adhémar notarial records, No. 481, original manuscript · BAnQ · 12 February 1680"Laroque" — written in the hand of notary Adhémar, on the deed by which Philibert Couillaud purchased his land from the Seigneur de Contrecoeur. The earliest known instance of the name his children would carry across a continent.Adhémar No. 481, 12 February 1680 · BAnQ
Two days later — forty-eight hours after purchasing his concession — Philibert appeared before Pierre Mesnard again, this time as a witness to a transport of one hundred livres between Louis Jean dit Lafontaine and Julien Brousseau dit Laverdure. He signed with his mark. The document notes: "la marque dudit Couillaud."
Lafontaine is the same man whose 1679 annulment Philibert had witnessed. The community was small. The same men encountered each other before the same notaries in the same seigneury, year after year. Philibert was embedded in it.
Transport of 100 livres, Louis Jean dit Lafontaine to Julien Brousseau dit Laverdure, before notary Pierre Mesnard, 14 February 1680 — two days after Philibert's concession purchase. Philibert appears as witness. Illiteracy noted: "la marque dudit Couillaud." Decipherment: Guy Perron, paleographer.
Pierre Mesnard notarial records, Contrecoeur · BAnQ · 14 February 1680Three acts in five months. Two notaries. One buyer, twice a witness. Contrecoeur in the winter of 1679–1680 was a community of perhaps thirty households, and Philibert Couillaud was one of its established members — illiterate, yes, but trusted enough to be called as witness, creditworthy enough to buy land, present enough to be there twice in forty-eight hours when Mesnard needed a name for his documents.
The Family on the Census
In 1681, Intendant Duchesneau ordered a census of the entire colony of New France. Every household was to be recorded: head of family, wife, children, livestock, firearms, and arpents under cultivation. The census survives. The original manuscript page for the Seigneurie de Contrecoeur is one of the most legible pages in the entire document. And there, third household after the seigneur's entry, is Philibert Couillaud's family.
What the Census Says
The original manuscript entry reads, in the hand of the census-taker:
Philibert Couillaut — 40 ans
Catherine Laporte sa femme — 17
Enfants: Jean Baptiste — 4, Jean François Juzoil — 1
1 fusil — 5 bêtes à cornes — 5 arpents en valeur
He is forty years old, which places his birth around 1641 — consistent with his service record. His wife is seventeen — consistent with her 1663 baptism. Two sons: Jean-Baptiste, four years old (born c. 1677, baptism record survives at Sorel), and Jean-François Juzoil, one year old (reconstructed record).
One musket. Five cattle. Five arpents under cultivation — exactly what you would expect from a man who purchased sixty arpents of raw land thirteen months earlier and spent those thirteen months clearing it.
Research analyst Michel Larocque, who has studied the family's birth intervals extensively, notes that the census also lists a child of five — which would suggest a son Jean (born c. 1676) distinct from Jean-Baptiste and potentially the first child of the marriage. This supports the 13-child hypothesis, which proposes the family had more children than the PRDH's standard enumeration of eleven.
Original manuscript, 1681 Census of New France, Seigneurie de Contrecoeur. Third household in the seigneury after the seigneur Pécaudy.
Library and Archives Canada · 1681 Census of New FranceThe PRDH download version of the census provides a cleaner transcription, useful for verification, but the original manuscript is the primary document — and it is remarkably clear. The census-taker moved through the seigneury household by household. After the seigneur, after his immediate neighbors, comes Philibert. He is, by this measure, the third most established settler in the community.
The Children
Between roughly 1676 and the late 1690s, Catherine Laporte bore Philibert Couillaud eleven children — perhaps thirteen, depending on which analysis you follow. Five have surviving baptism records. Six were born during a fourteen-and-a-half-year gap in the Contrecoeur parish registers and can only be documented through later records: confirmation entries, marriage records, their own children's baptisms. The gap, as we will see, was caused by fire.
PRDH-IGD Family Record #4480 documents eleven children of this union. The standard enumeration, accepted by most genealogists, is as follows:
| # | Name | Birth / Baptism | Parish | Record Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jean (probable) | c. 1676 | Contrecoeur (lost) | Listed age 5 in 1681 census · No baptism record · Michel Larocque hypothesis |
| 2 | Jean-Baptiste | 15 Oct 1677 / 20 Oct 1677 | Sorel (St-Pierre-de-Sorel) | Register + PRDH card ✓ |
| 3 | Jean-François Juzoil | c. 1680 | Contrecoeur (reconstructed) | Reconstructed from census |
| 4 | Marie-Anne | 4 Oct 1681 | Contrecoeur | Register + PRDH card ✓ |
| 5 | Antoine | 6 Nov 1683 / 7 Nov 1683 | Boucherville | Register + PRDH card ✓ |
| 6 | Catherine | 12 Jan 1685 | Contrecoeur | Register + PRDH card ✓ |
| 7 | François | 6 Dec 1686 | Contrecoeur | Register + PRDH card ✓ |
| 8 | Louis I | c. 1689 | Contrecoeur (register gap) | Born during 14.5-year lacune · PRDH card only |
| 9 | Michel | c. 1691 | Contrecoeur (register gap) | Born during 14.5-year lacune · PRDH card only |
| 10 | Marie Hilaire | c. 1693 | Contrecoeur (register gap) | Born during 14.5-year lacune · PRDH card only |
| 11 | Philibert fils | c. 1695 | Contrecoeur (register gap) | Born during 14.5-year lacune · PRDH card only |
| 12 | Marie Barbe | c. 1697 | Contrecoeur (register gap) | Born during 14.5-year lacune · PRDH card only |
Five baptism records survive — each from a different moment in the family's story. The first, Jean-Baptiste, was baptized not at Contrecoeur but at Sorel, in October 1677: the chapel at Contrecoeur had been contracted in December 1675, but perhaps was not yet serving the full sacramental calendar, or perhaps the family was briefly elsewhere. The fourth child, Marie-Anne, appears in the first Contrecoeur register. The fifth, Antoine, was baptized at Boucherville — a significant detour from Contrecoeur, raising the open question of why the family traveled there when their own chapel was fully operational, and pointing toward a Laporte family connection in Boucherville not yet investigated.
Jean-Baptiste Couillaud, born 15 October, baptized 20 October 1677, Sorel (St-Pierre-de-Sorel). Godfather: Jean Coittou dit StJean. Godmother: Catherine Platte, wife of Pierre Charron.
St-Pierre-de-Sorel parish register · FamilySearch
Marie-Anne Couilleau, baptized 4 October 1681, Contrecoeur. First child documented in the Contrecoeur register. Marie-Anne would later stand trial in 1702 for the murder of her husband — the most dramatic chapter in the family's post-Philibert history.
Contrecoeur parish register · FamilySearch
Antoine Couillau, born 6 November, baptized 7 November 1683, Boucherville (Très-Sainte-Famille), feuillet 19. Family residence: Contrecoeur. Godfather: Antoine Laporte; Godmother: Angélique Laporte (children of Georges Laporte & Nicole Duchesne, Boucherville). Open question: why Boucherville when Contrecoeur chapel was fully operational?
Paroisse de la Très-Sainte-Famille, Boucherville · BAnQ
Catherine Couillaud, baptized 12 January 1685, Contrecoeur. The last two children with surviving baptism records — Catherine (1685) and François (1686) — were born just before the second devastating fire closed the register for fourteen and a half years.
Contrecoeur parish register · FamilySearchThe Debt Ledger: The X
The richest single document in the Philibert Couillaud research file is not a birth record or a marriage entry. It is a debt. On 18 May 1688, Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune borrowed 118 livres 18 sols from Montréal merchant Charles de Couagne, before Royal Notary Claude Maugue. In the course of recording that transaction, the document yields four independent findings that together constitute more biographical information about Philibert than all other documents combined.
It tells us where his land was: between the concession of his father-in-law Georges Laporte dit Saint-Georges and his brother-in-law Louis Laporte. The family geography is pinned precisely — the Laporte family neighbors, the Catherine he married is placed in a specific kinship web, the seigneury layout becomes legible.
It tells us who his acquaintances were: François Bailly, physician, and Nicolas Droissy, pastry baker — both Montréal men, witnesses to the transaction, whose presence suggests that Philibert had commercial connections reaching beyond the Contrecoeur seigneury into the colonial capital.
It tells us he had debt: one hundred and eighteen livres eighteen sols, a sum that would take years to repay, borrowed from one of the most prominent merchants in the colony. By 1688, Philibert was raising a large family on a cleared concession, managing livestock, and carrying debt — the ordinary condition of a colonial habitant.
And it tells us, in the most direct and intimate way possible, that he could not read or write.
The phrase "ne sçavoir écrire ny signer suivant l'ordonnance" — did not know how to write or sign according to the ordinance — was the standard legal formula for illiteracy in New France notarial practice. It was not a judgment. It was a fact, entered into the record, followed by the mark of the party: an X.
That X is the most intimate evidence Philibert Couillaud ever left in any archive. Every other document was written by someone else about him — a census-taker recording his age, a notary writing down his name, a bishop's secretary noting his origin. The X is the only thing in the entire research file that came from his own hand.
The same illiteracy formula appears in the 1679 Mesnard witness act, the 1680 concession purchase, and the 1680 transport. It will appear again in the final obligation. Philibert never learned to write. In 1688, he was roughly forty-seven years old, had been in New France for twenty-three years, and had raised at least seven children. The X was his signature throughout.
Notarial obligation, Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune to Charles de Couagne, 118 livres 18 sols, before Royal Notary Claude Maugue, 18 May 1688. Land described as located in Contrecoeur between the concession of Georges Laporte dit Saint-Georges (father-in-law) and Louis Laporte (brother-in-law). Witnesses: François Bailly (physician) and Nicolas Droissy (pastry baker), both of Montréal.
ANQ Montréal, Greffe Claude Maugue · 18 May 1688The Years of Silence
After François was baptized on 6 December 1686 — the last baptism in the Contrecoeur register before the fire — the documentary record for Philibert Couillaud's family goes silent for fourteen and a half years. This is not a silence of inactivity. Between 1687 and 1701, Catherine bore at least four more children, Philibert incurred at least two more debts, and life in the seigneury continued in every measurable way. What ended was the parish register.
Contrecoeur is one of very few Quebec parishes to lose its registers twice. The first fire — at the home of surgeon Jean Bouvet dit Lachambre, who housed the visiting missionary priest and apparently kept the registers with him — destroyed two and a half years of records (roughly June 1678 through January 1681). A compiler's note in the surviving volume documents the loss explicitly.
The second fire was more catastrophic. Sometime in 1687, the registers were lost again. The volume cover of the surviving Contrecoeur register records the years it contains and the years it does not. The index, compiled later by a church archivist, records the lacune in plain language: "1687 en partie... 1688 à 1701 manquent." Fourteen and a half years. Missing.
Cover of the surviving Contrecoeur parish register, documenting the years present and absent. The notation of missing leaves records the two fire losses explicitly.
ANQ · Contrecoeur parish records
Compiler's note documenting the first fire: "perdus ou détruits par le feu" — lost or destroyed by fire. The note identifies surgeon Jean Bouvet dit Lachambre's home as the location where the registers were kept when the fire occurred.
ANQ · Contrecoeur parish records
The register index records the second and far more devastating loss: "1687 en partie... 1688 à 1701 manquent." Fourteen and a half years. The baptisms of at least five of Philibert's eleven children were entered in these lost registers and do not survive.
ANQ · Contrecoeur parish register indexThe gap swallowed the baptisms of Louis, Michel, Marie Hilaire, Philibert fils, and Marie Barbe — five children born between roughly 1689 and 1697. Their births can only be estimated from the evidence that surrounds the gap: their approximate ages at marriage, the children they had, the census entries that document them as adults. The gap is not a failure of research. It is a documented historical fact. The registers burned. The children's baptisms went with them.
During this same period, Philibert continued to incur debt. A notarial index from 1701 documents an obligation to Marguerite Sédillot for 150 livres, incurred in 1687 — the same year the register gap began. A final obligation, No. 3063, also survives from the late obligation period. The debts were accumulating. The family was growing. The register was gone. Philibert himself, sometime around 1699 or 1700, died.
The Widow's Fight
Philibert Couillaud's death left no burial record. He did not die in the parish register. He died in his debts — and it was his creditors, not his priest, who made the record. The first document to record his death names him "deffunt Philibert Couillau dit Rocquebrune" — the late Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune. It is a lawsuit. The date is 8 March 1701.
Joseph Aubuchon and the heirs of Marguerite Sédillot — the woman to whom Philibert had owed 150 livres since 1687 — filed suit in the Royal Jurisdiction of Montreal against Catherine Laporte, now a widow. The lawsuit establishes a hard terminus: Philibert was dead before 9 March 1701. How long before, the documents do not say. A year, perhaps. Perhaps two. The register gap means no death record exists to narrow it further.
Opening page of BAnQ TL4,S1,D480: Aubuchon / Sédillot heirs vs. Catherine Laporte, "veuve de deffunt Philibert Couillau dit Rocquebrune." The first document to record Philibert's death — a debt collection, not a burial register.
BAnQ TL4,S1,D480 · Royal Jurisdiction of Montréal · 1701–1707
The lawsuit continued through multiple hearings from 1701 to 1707. Catherine's wheat was eventually seized — a document in the file records the seizure. She managed the family's debts without her husband for the remainder of her time in Contrecoeur.
BAnQ TL4,S1,D480 · Royal Jurisdiction of MontréalThe legal cascade that followed Philibert's death was, in its own way, the richest documentary harvest of the entire research project. Each legal proceeding required the parties to identify themselves, name their relationships, and state their claims — and in doing so, they reconstructed details of Philibert's life that no surviving primary document would otherwise contain.
In 1711, ten years after Philibert's death, the Pécaudy family seized the Couillaud concession for unpaid debts and held an auction at the seigneury. The concession — the same sixty arpents Philibert had purchased from the seigneur in February 1680 for thirty livres — came under the hammer. Son Antoine Couillaud bid on it and won, paying 278 livres. In the course of the auction, Antoine formally invoked the douaire préfix from his parents' marriage contract — a clause protecting his mother's dower rights — which raised the final bid from 214 livres to 278. The marriage contract itself is lost. This auction record is the only place where we know it contained a dower clause.
A 1728 dispute between two of Philibert's sons references Catherine Laporte's dower of 15 livres per year for 30 years "suivant le contrait de mariage" — according to the marriage contract. The marriage contract itself has never been found. These are the only surviving terms. The document was drawn up 53 years after the marriage it references.
Archives du District de Montréal · 15 October 1728In 1728 — twenty-seven years after Philibert's death, fifty-three years after his marriage — a dispute between two of his adult sons referenced the terms of his marriage contract for the last time: "le douaire préfix de quinze livres par an pendant trente ans suivant le contrait de mariage." The dower was fifteen livres per year for thirty years, for a total of 450 livres. These figures, preserved in a lawsuit that had nothing to do with reconstructing Philibert's biography, are the only evidence that his marriage contract ever existed in any form we can read.
Catherine After Philibert
Catherine Laporte dit Saint-Georges outlived her first husband by thirty-six years. She managed his debts, raised their remaining children, survived the seizure of her wheat crop, and eventually remarried — to a man whose priest got her first husband's name wrong. She died on 11 April 1737 in Varennes, approximately seventy-three years old. Her story does not end with Philibert's death. It continues, at length, and with considerable resourcefulness.
The lawsuit years were hard. The Aubuchon case dragged through the courts from 1701 to 1707. Catherine appears in the documents as veuve — widow — and as a respondent in legal proceedings she did not initiate. But she did not disappear. She managed the concession, or tried to, until the 1711 auction took it.
On 9 October 1706, Catherine Laporte remarried in Varennes. Her second husband was Jean Charpentier. The parish register entry records her as "veuve de feu Jean Couillault" — the priest wrote the wrong given name. Philibert became Jean in the register of his widow's second marriage. It is a small and entirely human error, the kind that has confused researchers for generations.
Catherine Laporte remarries Jean Charpentier at Varennes, 9 October 1706. The register records her as "veuve de feu Jean Couillault" — the priest wrote Jean instead of Philibert. A small clerical error that has generated significant genealogical confusion. Catherine was approximately forty-three years old.
Varennes parish register · 9 October 1706Catherine lived another thirty-one years after her second marriage. Jean Charpentier died before her; she outlived both husbands. She died on 11 April 1737 in Varennes, nearly sixty-two years after the fall of 1675 when she had stood in that new chapel in Contrecoeur — not yet thirteen years old, the daughter of the seigneury's most established Laporte family — and married a soldier from Nevers who could not sign his name.
A Note on Marie-Anne: L'Affaire Lachaume
Among Philibert and Catherine's eleven children, one story stands entirely apart from the rest. Their daughter Marie-Anne — baptized at Contrecoeur on 4 October 1681, the family's first child documented in the Contrecoeur register — murdered her husband Léonard Girault Lachaume in February 1702, fled with her lover to New England, was tried in absentia by the Royal Jurisdiction of Montréal, condemned to death, and executed in effigy.
The trial transcript survives. All 128 pages. The interrogation at Deschambault, the arrest warrant issued by huissier Petit, the testimony of neighbors, the flight, the condemnation. It is one of the most complete surviving records of a colonial New France criminal proceeding.
Marie-Anne was twenty years old when her father died. She was twenty-one when she killed her husband. The 128-page trial that followed is a future case study in its own right.
L'Affaire Lachaume — Coming Soon →
The interrogation at Deschambault, from the 128-page trial transcript of Marie-Anne Couillaud. She was the fifth child of Philibert and Catherine — baptized four months after the 1681 census was taken.
Royal Jurisdiction of Montréal, 1702 · BAnQThe Name He Left Behind
Philibert Couillaud arrived in New France as a soldier and left it as a surname. The name Rocbrune — first written in 1667, confirmed in 1679, used as Roquebrune in the 1688 obligation, and appearing in its abbreviated form Laroque in the 1680 concession deed — underwent its final transformation in the generation after his death.
His children chose the simplified form. Larocque — a Gallicized derivative of la roque, the rock — became the dominant spelling by the early eighteenth century. As the descendants moved west and south, English orthography carried it further. Research analyst Michel Larocque, who has studied the family's genealogy extensively, estimates that approximately 80% of all Larocques currently living in North America descend from this one man from the diocese of Nevers.
PRDH-IGD estimates between 420,000 and 840,000 Quebec descendants alone. The number alive today, across Canada, the United States, and wherever the family traveled, is larger still.
All trace, through the evidence chain built across this research file, to one man who could not sign his name — who left an X on a debt ledger in Montréal in 1688, on a notarial act in Contrecoeur in 1679, on a concession purchase in 1680, and on a transport witnessed the day after — and whose descendants carry the echo of that name, in a dozen spellings, across a continent.
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