The Death That Never Was

The Problem

François Séguin dit Ladéroute holds a singular place in North American genealogy. Arriving in New France with the Carignan-Salières Regiment in 1665, he became the progenitor of virtually all Séguin families across the continent. Denis Beauregard's compilation estimates his descendants at between 1,890,000 and 2,310,000 Quebecers across twelve recorded generations.

Two of the most consulted reference databases record his death as 9 May 1704, with burial the following day at Notre-Dame-de-Montréal. PRDH-IGD carries it on individual record no. 68331. Fichier Origine carries it on record no. 243774, last modified in February 2023.

They are not two witnesses. Fichier Origine identifies the migrant from the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec, page 1041 — and DGFQ is the same compilation Beauregard flags as the origin of the erroneous date. Both databases descend from a single source.

What the Databases Record

The Raimbault acts are the hinge. Let us read them.

Resolving the Parish Records

Two parish records dated after October 1701 appear, on an index reading, to describe François Séguin as living. A third, dated 1715, states plainly that he was dead. All three must be accounted for.

The Marriage of François fils, 22 February 1702

Four months after his mother was called a widow before a Montréal notary, François Séguin the younger married Marie Louise Feuillon at Sainte-Famille de Boucherville. The PRDH index for that marriage records both of his parents as married.

Page from the Boucherville (Sainte-Famille) parish register containing the marriage of François Séguin fils to Marie Louise Feuillon, 22 February 1702.

The Marriage of Simon, 11 November 1715

Thirteen years later, Simon Séguin, widowed, returned to Sainte-Famille de Boucherville to marry Madeleine Cole, a young woman of New England origin then in service to the merchant Papin. The act of that marriage does what the acts of 1701 and 1702 do not.

The Case Against This Reading

The reading this study replaces is not new, and it is not anonymous. It was set out by the ethnologist Robert-Lionel Séguin in articles published in 1947, and it rests on a reasoning the 1994 article states plainly:

That reasoning is sound on its premises. The burial names an habitant of Sainte-Famille de Boucherville who died at the Hôtel-Dieu in Montréal; if no second man of that name can be produced, an error in the given name is the economical explanation. Everything turns on whether the second premise still holds.

It is also the reading still in print. Peter J. Gagné's From Soldiers to Settlers (2025) gives François's dates as 1644–1704 and states that he died on 9 May 1704 at the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal and was buried the next day under the first name Pierre. Gagné's source line reads Jetté, PRDH, Tanguay and Trudel — all downstream of the 1947 articles — and La Séguinière does not appear among them. He cites the contract of 20 November 1700 and the phrase indisposition; he does not mention the contract of 9 October 1701 in which Jeanne Petit acts as veufue de deffunct françois Seguin. The 2025 book is therefore not an independent judgment against the corrected range so much as a continuation of the reading that range was published to replace.

The Second Premise No Longer Holds

A Pierre Séguin dit Ladéroute does appear in the Montréal registers of the 1690s, and he cannot be François's son.

A boy of ten does not stand godfather, and a boy of thirteen is not called as a witness to a marriage. These appearances place a Pierre Séguin dit Ladéroute of adult standing in the Montréal district a decade before the disputed burial. That is not an identification, and this study does not offer one — but the 1947 argument required that no such man existed, and he did.

Two further points weigh against the 1704 reading. The parish register of Boucherville, in the act of 11 November 1715, records François as deceased with his widow present — difficult to reconcile with a death in 1704 unless the same register is supposed capable of two errors about the same man. And François is absent from his children's marriage contracts throughout the period he is supposed to have been living:

The last of these is three months before the disputed burial. If the father were living at Boucherville that winter and transacting before a notary there, his absence from his own son's marriage contract — with the son François standing in his place — would require explanation. None has been offered.

The Two Notarial Entries of 1703 and 1704

There remains one live evidentiary problem. The répertoire of Marien Tailhandier, notary at Boucherville, contains two entries naming a François Séguin dit Ladéroute after the death this study proposes:

The Test That Would Settle It

Both acts can be resolved on sight, because the two men differ in a respect that notarial acts record.

François the elder could write. He and Jeanne Petit both signed their marriage contract of 21 September 1672 before notary Frérot, and he signed the baptismal register of Sainte-Famille on 12 November 1688 at the baptism of his son Jean-Baptiste, alongside the godfather and the witness Julien Beaussault.

The 1994 article adds a further observation from the same greffe. The last act it identifies as signed by François is a lease of two cows from the Sieur de Niverville, drawn before Tailhandier on 30 October 1700 — three weeks before the indisposition is recorded. Its author notes that the signature already appears less steady than usual, but that he was still well enough to come to the notary's office at Boucherville and sign. No signed act by François is identified after that date.

Notarial acts close with the same formula as parish registers: the parties either sign or declare that they cannot. If the 13 October 1703 lease or the 2 March 1704 obligation carries a signature, the party is the father, the death range set out here fails, and the 1704 reading is vindicated. If either reads ne sachant signer, the party is the son and the case for 1701 stands undisturbed.

Methodology

What the Correction Changes

The correction does not affect descent. François Séguin dit Ladéroute remains the progenitor whatever the date of his death. It affects four things:

• The length of Jeanne Petit's widowhood, which runs thirty-two years to her death in March 1733 rather than twenty-nine.
• The circumstances of his last years. The illness recorded in November 1700 came seven months after he and Jeanne received their lifetime grant on Île Grosbois, and he did not recover from it.
• The reading of his children's marriages. Marie Madeleine married with her father too ill to attend; Marie Jeanne, eleven months later, married as the daughter of a dead man.
• The status of the 1704 burial, which on the reading advanced here belongs to an unidentified Pierre Séguin dit La Déroute of Boucherville and remains an open research question.