The Death That Never Was
The Date in Every Tree
François Séguin dit Ladéroute came to New France with the Carignan-Salières regiment in 1665 and settled at Boucherville. Denis Beauregard’s compilation estimates his descendants at between 1,890,000 and 2,310,000 Quebecers across twelve generations. The date on which he died is therefore carried, unexamined, in a very large number of family trees.
…le corps de Pierre Seguin dit La Deroute, habitant de la paroisse de La Sainte Famille de Boucherville, mort a l’Hôtel Dieu de cette Ville le jour précédent…
Notre-Dame-de-Montréal, BêMêS 1700–1704. BAnQ, Montréal.
Every condition for a misattribution sits in one line. The surname is Séguin. The dit name is La Déroute. The man is an habitant of Sainte-Famille de Boucherville. Only the given name separates the two, and a compiler working from an abstract would never see it.
PRDH-IGD carries 9 May 1704 on individual record 68331. Fichier Origine carries it on record 243774. They are not independent: Fichier Origine identifies the migrant from the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec, page 1041 — the same compilation flagged as the origin of the date. Traced back far enough, all of it is one authority: articles published by the ethnologist Robert-Lionel Séguin in 1947.
A correction already existed. J. Jacques Séguin published the earlier range in La Séguinière in June 1994, on page nine. On page eighteen of the same issue, a feature on Séguin street names gives his dates as 1644–1704 and has him dying at the Hôtel-Dieu. The correction did not travel to the back of its own journal.
Françoys Ceguens Fils
The two entries in the répertoire of Marien Tailhandier, notary at Boucherville, were the whole difficulty: a lease of 13 October 1703 and an obligation of 2 March 1704, each indexed under “François Séguin dit Ladéroute,” the second nine weeks before the disputed burial.
Notarial acts close with one of two formulas: the parties sign, or they declare that they cannot. The two are not interchangeable, and in this family they fall on opposite sides of a generation.
| Date | Act |
|---|---|
| 14 Sep 1671 | Lease from Robert Heury, greffe Frérot 61 |
| 21 Nov 1671 | Two cattle leases for Pierre Boucher, as witness |
| 21 Sep 1672 | His marriage contract, greffe Frérot 81 |
| 22 Sep 1672 | Two acts clearing the title to his land, as witness |
| 25 Jan 1673 | Sale to François Sénécal, greffe Frérot 89 |
| 29 Oct 1684 | Obligation at Montréal, greffe Basset 1591 |
| 24 Nov 1698 | Sale of the farm, greffe Adhémar |
| 15 Apr 1700 | Concession on the Île Grosbois, greffe Tailhandier 18 |
| 30 Oct 1700 | Lease of two cows, greffe Tailhandier 33 |
His wife never signed: Jeanne Petit made her mark in 1672 and declared she could not write or sign in 1698, 1700, 1710 and 1715. Neither did the son who bore his name, at his own marriage in 1702 or at his brother’s contract in 1704. The man who signed ten acts across twenty-nine years is not the man declaring in 1703 that he cannot write.
The 1713 act had been in the file for weeks without being seen. It is not a separate document: it runs down the left margin of the first page of the 1700 concession, in a later hand. The images had been retrieved for the grant. Nobody had read the margin.
Eleven Months, and a Stranger’s Grave
François Séguin dit Ladéroute, baptised 4 July 1644 at Saint-Aubin-en-Bray in Picardy, died between 20 November 1700 and 9 October 1701, at fifty-six or fifty-seven. No burial record has been located and no place of death is established. His last recorded residence was the Île Grosbois.
In November 1698 he and Jeanne Petit sold their farm. In April 1700 they took a strip of standing timber on the Île Grosbois from the widow of Ignace Boucher, for their two lives only, their children barred from claiming even the buildings on it. He signed that concession. He signed a lease of two cows on 30 October. Three weeks later he was too ill to come to the notary, and he never recovered.
Two Boucherville marriages, in 1702 and 1704, name François without défunt while marking each bride’s father deceased in the same sentence. It is the strongest argument against everything above, and it does not survive the register.
The same curé married François’s son Simon in November 1715 and wrote « fils de deffunt François Seguin et de Jeanne Petit ses pere et mere habitans de Boucherville » — and in the same sentence named the bride « fille de Joseph Colle », with no qualifier, though a notary had called her father deffunt the day before. Across three acts, all six fathers named were dead, and the pattern of 1702 is reversed in both halves in 1715.
Nor was he ignorant of the fact. In June 1710 he stood in his own presbytery as a witness to Jean-Baptiste Séguin’s marriage contract, in which the notary recorded François as deffunt twice — and the curé signed the page.
The record-by-record account behind this case study — how originals were separated from the index layer, how the father’s hand was used to tell him from his son, the three explanations tested and eliminated for the parish silence, the searches that came back empty with their extent stated, and the full citations — is set out in the methodology. Every act is reproduced and cited in the document gallery.
Full Methodology Documents & Sources Evidence Timeline