Saint-Constant-de-la-Prairie-de-la-Magdeleine
Saint-Constant
On August 11, 1797, a curé named Ch. Bégin baptized twin infants at Saint-Constant. One of them was Laurent Quintal—son of a farmer named François and his wife Marie Hébert. Twenty years later, that same child would enter the pays d’en haut as a North West Company hivernant. The baptism register that recorded his birth also records, in its margins, the world that made him.
The church of Saint-Constant today, a stone structure reflecting the parish’s 19th-century growth. Though this building postdates the 1797 twin baptism, it stands in the same community where François Quintal recorded his children and where an entire generation of young men signed contracts for the fur trade before heading west.
The register entry is brief: two children baptized on the same day, born the day before. Father: François Quintal, fermier. Mother: Marie Hébert. The curé noted the act with a common device of the era—"Acte commun avec sa jumelle Marie Suzanne"—a shared record for twins. Marie Suzanne would die fifteen days later. Laurent survived, grew to manhood in the south shore landscape of the St. Lawrence valley, and in February 1817 signed his name—or made his mark—in the service of the North West Company.
The church that recorded his birth was not the formal institution that would define the parish in later generations. Saint-Constant in 1797 was a mission community settled on Jesuit land, its residents tied to the rhythms of farming and the seasonal pull of the fur trade. The same register that baptized Laurent Quintal had baptized the sons of other families who signed NWC and HBC contracts, paddled the canoe routes west, and sometimes returned. Sometimes did not.
The Record That Anchors the Line
In the parish register of Saint-Constant, this entry establishes Laurent Quintal’s correct family and place of origin:
Saint-Constant (La Prairie) | Baptized August 11, 1797 | PRDH #671580
Father’s occupation: fermier—farmer. The same La Prairie district that supplied labor to the fur trade brigades supplied Laurent Quintal to the North West Company twenty years later. The PRDH-IGD database independently confirms his parentage in Family Record #55528, and the HBCA biographical sheet confirms St. Constant as his parish. These three sources agree on what the circulating family trees have not: this man’s family, his origins, and his identity.
A Parish on the South Shore
Saint-Constant sits on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, 30 kilometres south of Montréal, within what was the Seigneurie de La Prairie-de-la-Magdeleine. Though the civil parish was not formally established until 1841, the community had roots in the mid-18th century, its name honouring Constant Le Marchand de Lignery, a French officer whose son Jacques served as a missionary in the area for several years. By the time of Laurent Quintal’s birth in 1797, Saint-Constant was an established, if modest, Catholic community—its families farming the south shore land while its young men looked increasingly westward.
The La Prairie district was, by the late 18th century, one of the primary recruiting grounds for the fur trade brigades that departed Montréal each spring. Young men from farming families in Saint-Constant, Saint-Philippe, and the surrounding seigneuries signed notarized contracts as engagés—hired hands—for the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company. They typically entered the trade in their early twenties, spent one to three years in the interior country, and returned with wages that helped establish a farm. François Quintal’s occupation in the baptism register—fermier—describes exactly the life to which so many voyageurs eventually returned.
The Baptism Record, August 11, 1797
The original parish register page from Saint-Constant, 1797. Laurent Quintal’s baptism entry shares this page with those of other south shore families—each name a thread in the fabric of a community that would send its sons into the fur trade country and, in Laurent’s case, as far as the Snake River of the Pacific Northwest.
Laurent Quintal (and twin Marie Suzanne)
Child: Laurent, né le dix août mil sept cent quatre-vingt-dix-sept (born August 10, 1797)
Father: François Quintal — fermier, Saint-Constant (La Prairie)
Mother: Marie Hébert — épouse de François Quintal, Saint-Constant (La Prairie)
Godfather (Laurent): Alexis Picard
Godmother (Laurent): Catherine Lanctot
Godfather (Marie Suzanne): René Bordeau
Godmother (Marie Suzanne): Marie Louise Roy, épouse de Charles Beauvais
Officiant: Ch. Bégin père — curé de St-Constant
Note: Acte commun avec sa jumelle Marie Suzanne (Shared act with his twin Marie Suzanne)
Marie Suzanne Quintal — August 11 to August 25, 1797
The register does not mark the difference between them. Laurent and Marie Suzanne are baptized together on August 11 in a single act—acte commun—their godparents different, their entry shared. Fifteen days later, Marie Suzanne was dead. The curé Ch. Bégin recorded her burial on August 26 in the same register: "décédée de la veille agée de quinze jours"—died the day before, age fifteen days. The witness at the burial was Joseph Lemieux, who declared he did not know how to sign.
Infant mortality in late 18th-century Quebec was not unusual. Families expected to bury children, and the registers document this expectation in their matter-of-fact notations. What is striking here is the precision of the record: fifteen days is specific, almost tender. The priest counted. He noted the day before. He gave her the full form of her parents’ names—François Quintal and Marie Hébert—the same names that appear in Laurent’s baptism entry eleven days earlier. The family lost a twin and kept a son. The register holds both facts on the same pages.
Marie Suzanne Quintal — age fifteen days
Deceased: Marie Suzanne Quintal, age approximately fifteen days (born August 10, 1797)
Father: François Quintal
Mother: Marie Hébert
Witness: Joseph Lemieux — qui a déclaré ne sçavoir signer (who declared he does not know how to sign)
Officiant: Ch. Bégin père — curé de St-Constant
Detail of the burial entry: “le corps de Marie Suzanne Quintal fille de François Quintal et de Marie Hébert décédée de la veille agée de quinze jours.” Died the day before, age fifteen days. The same curé who baptized her eleven days after her birth now records her burial. Witness: Joseph Lemieux, who could not sign.
A Nursery for Voyageurs
Saint-Constant and its neighbouring parishes in the La Prairie district were not incidental to the fur trade. They were central to it. The Montreal-Trois-Rivières corridor—the rural belt of south shore and north shore farming communities within a day’s travel of the city—supplied a significant proportion of the engagés who paddled the NWC and HBC canoe routes westward each spring. Notarized contracts between young men from these parishes and the major fur trade companies survive in the archives of Montréal by the thousands.
The World Laurent Quintal Was Born Into
The South Shore and the Fur Trade
The La Prairie district parishes—Saint-Constant, Saint-Philippe, La Prairie itself—were what historians of the fur trade have called a “nursery for voyageurs.” Young men signed their first NWC or HBC contracts in their early twenties, typically shortly after marriage, to earn capital needed to establish their own farms. Fur trade employment was not a career for most; it was a phase, a financial strategy, and for some a calling that proved stronger than the pull of the south shore land.
Before departing each spring, brigades made their way along the south bank of the St. Lawrence to the western tip of Montréal Island, stopping at Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue to pray before their patron saint. The church at Sainte-Anne was the last familiar threshold before the pays d’en haut opened before them. Some men from Saint-Constant and the neighbouring parishes made that crossing once. Some made it many times over many years. Laurent Quintal’s NWC and HBC career spanned twenty years—not a phase, but a life.
The Chasse-Galerie legend—voyageurs flying home in a devil’s canoe to visit their sweethearts in parishes like Lavaltrie or Saint-Constant on New Year’s Eve—grew from exactly this world: men gone so long that only magic seemed likely to bring them back. The registers that recorded their children’s baptisms fell silent during the years the men were gone, then filled again when they returned with wages from the interior.
The Quintal family was part of this landscape. PRDH-IGD Family Record #55528 shows François Quintal and Marie Hébert with seventeen children, of whom Laurent was the fifteenth—a farming family of the south shore whose sons grew up in earshot of the canoe brigades assembling at La Prairie each spring. The family’s position in the register—fermiers, farmers—was the anchor from which the young men of the next generation would depart, and to which most eventually returned.
The parish register records Laurent Quintal’s baptism in 1797. The next primary source that names him is the North West Company ledger in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, HBCA F.4/32 folio 970, dated 1817. Twenty years of life in Saint-Constant—childhood, young manhood, whatever circumstances led him to sign a NWC contract rather than establish a farm—are invisible in the surviving records. His twin sister died fifteen days after their shared baptism. His father could not sign his name. Beyond those facts, the documentary record falls silent until he appears as a young fur trader in the interior.
This silence is not unusual. It is the normal condition of the historical record for working-class French-Canadian men of the early republic period. They appear in baptism registers, occasionally in marriage records, and then in the institutional records of the employers who sent them west. The HBCA, in this sense, is not supplementary to the Quebec parish record system—for men like Laurent Quintal, it is its continuation. The parish register at Saint-Constant that opens his documentary chain and the Oregon State Archives Early Oregonian Database that records his 1861 Douglas County death close an arc anchored at both ends by primary vital records—a sacramental register at one end, a civil archive at the other, and the HBCA account books that span everything in between.
From the Baptismal Font to the Snake River
The life documented in primary sources for Laurent Quintal traces an arc that begins in this church and ends sixty-four years later on a farm in Douglas County, Oregon. The baptism register at Saint-Constant is the first document in a chain that eventually runs through four archive collections on two sides of a continent.
The cemetery at Saint-Constant, where the families of the south shore farming community rest. François Quintal and Marie Hébert are among the generations whose names are preserved in the register that begins with Laurent’s birth in 1797. Their son died in Oregon. He is not buried here.
The Other Names on the Page
The register page that records Laurent Quintal’s baptism records other families alongside him—the Perraults, the Bourgeois, the Bruneau family whose marriage the previous year is noted in the records of the same parish. These are the families of the south shore farming community, their lives documented in the rhythms of the Catholic sacrament system: baptism, marriage, burial. For most of them the register is the complete primary record of their existence.
For some of their sons, however, the register is only the beginning. The Quintal family’s La Prairie district connections appear in the NWC and HBC account books as names among thousands of south shore men who signed contracts for the western trade. The Société historique de Saint-Boniface maintains a database of over 36,000 voyageur contracts, searchable by surname and parish of origin—a record system that extends the reach of the Quebec parish registers into the pays d’en haut itself.
The Dano / Denaut / Denault family also appears in the records of the Saint-Constant and La Prairie parishes—the name a common phonetic variation in a community where English-language clerks rendered French-Canadian surnames as they heard them. Bishop Pierre Denaut (1743–1806) was a significant ecclesiastical figure who oversaw missions and population growth in the areas where these voyageurs were recruited. The Dano / Denault men who appear in notarized fur trade contracts served as milieux—middlemen in the canoe brigade—for NWC-era companies operating out of Montréal.
The intersection of Quintal and Dano names in the La Prairie district records is not coincidental. These were the families of the same south shore farming community, their sons paddling the same routes west, their records preserved in the same parish registers and the same HBCA account books. The genealogical research that connects Laurent Quintal to the pays d’en haut opens a door into a community, not just a biography.
Document Gallery
Primary sources and photographs documenting Saint-Constant and the Quintal family records
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