Philibert Couillaud dit Roquebrune

The Challenge

Philibert Couillaud was born around 1641 in the diocese of Nevers, Nivernais — one of fewer than thirty settlers from this region in all of New France between 1650 and 1750. He arrived with the Carignan-Salières Regiment in 1665, settled in the Seigneurie de Contrecoeur after his discharge, and died sometime before 9 March 1701. Together with Catherine Laporte dit Saint-Georges, whom he married around the fall of 1675, he fathered eleven children across a twenty-five-year span. Their descendants — through the surnames Larocque, Roquebrune, Larock, Rock, and more than a dozen variants — now number between 420,000 and 840,000.

None of that was easy to establish. Philibert's name appears as Couillaud, Couillaut, Couillat, Coulleau, Caillou, Rocbrune, Rocquebrune, Roquebrune, and Larocque across the documentary record — a shape-shifting identity that made reliable identification a constant methodological challenge.

For generations, some researchers placed Philibert as a son of the alleged noble Bernard de Laroque, connecting him to southern French aristocracy. This lineage was fabricated by Robert de Roquebrune — a twentieth-century novelist and archivist who invented a pedigree for his own family. The fiction persists in online databases. It has no evidentiary foundation. Philibert's actual origins — diocese of Nevers, parents unknown — are confirmed by his 1669 confirmation register, where he appears as "Philbert Couilliau de Nevers." That record, made in his own era, is the authoritative statement of origin.

Contrecoeur is one of the few Quebec parishes to lose its registers not once but twice. The first fire — at the home of surgeon Jean Bouvet dit Lachambre, who housed the visiting missionary and kept the registers — destroyed 2.5 years of records (June 1678 through January 1681). A compiler's note in the surviving volume documents this loss explicitly.

The second and far more devastating gap spans 14.5 years: 1687 en partie through 1701 manquent. The register index records each missing year by name. This gap encompasses the baptisms of seven of Philibert's eleven children — including Louis, Michel, Marie Hilaire, and Philibert fils, all of whose births must be reconstructed from later records rather than confirmed by primary parish documentation.

What remained after the fires was a scattered archive: five notarial acts, a civil lawsuit, land records, a census, five surviving baptism entries across four different parishes, and a series of legal documents generated after Philibert's death by a widow struggling to manage debts exceeding 463 livres. The marriage contract itself has never been found. His death record does not survive. No burial register entry marks his passing.

Proving the facts of his life — his origins, his marriage, his children, his death — required assembling this dispersed evidence into a coherent, BCG-compliant evidentiary argument.

The Breakthrough

The Result

Philibert Couillaud arrived in New France as a soldier and left it as a surname. The dit name Roquebrune — a toponymic reference to a rocky height, from the Occitan roc brun — appears first in the 1667 land sale as Rocbrune. It is confirmed in the 1679 annulment witness, the 1688 obligation, the 1701 lawsuit, and all subsequent legal documents as his standard identifier. Notably, the abbreviated form Laroque appears as early as 1680 — in the hand of Notary Adhémar, on the very concession deed in which Philibert purchased his land from the Seigneur de Contrecoeur. The shift to Larocque was not purely a development of the next generation; it was already present in official notarial documents during Philibert's own lifetime. By the next generation it had become the dominant form, and English Anglicization carried it further: Larock, Roque, Rock, Rockburn, Rockbrune. Research analyst Michel Larocque estimates that approximately 80% of all Larocques currently living in North America descend from this one man from Nevers.

PRDH-IGD Family Record #4480 documents eleven children of Philibert and Catherine Laporte. Five have surviving baptism records: Jean-Baptiste (Sorel, 1677), Marie-Anne (Contrecoeur, 1681), Antoine (Boucherville, 1683), Catherine (Contrecoeur, 1685), François (Contrecoeur, 1686). Six more — including the ancestors of the Larocque, Roquebrune, and Rock surname lines — were born during the 14.5-year register gap with no surviving parish documentation. An alternative analysis by Michel Larocque proposes 13 children, accounting for an unnamed child in the 1681 census and two additional births during the gap period. The question remains unresolved. Both hypotheses are documented in the research file.

Reconstructed from the 1667 land sale before notary Bénigne Basset (BAnQ, Greffe Bénigne Basset); the 1669 Chambly confirmation register (PRDH #403509); the 8 September 1679 annulment witness (Pierre Mesnard notarial records, Contrecoeur); the 12 February 1680 land concession purchase from the Seigneur de Contrecoeur (Antoine Adhémar, No. 481, BAnQ); the 14 February 1680 transport witness (Pierre Mesnard notarial records); the 1 December 1675 Contrecoeur chapel construction contract; the 1681 Census of New France (Library and Archives Canada); the 18 May 1688 notarial obligation before Royal Notary Claude Maugue (ANQ, Montréal); five surviving Contrecoeur-area baptism registers (FamilySearch); the parish register gap documentation — Compiler's Note, Volume Cover, and Lacune Index (ANQ); BAnQ TL4,S1,D480 (Aubuchon lawsuit, 1701–1707); BAnQ TL4,S1,D1280 (land auction, 1711, complete 16-page PDF); the 15 October 1728 dower document (Archives du District de Montréal); PRDH-IGD Family Record #4480 and individual records for all eleven documented children; FrancoGene Individual Record [16026]; and the analytical birth-date research of Michel Larocque (Larocque family archive). Evidence examined and weighed: two conflicting birth-date hypotheses (11 vs. 13 children) per Michel Larocque's comparative analysis; the fraudulent Bernard de Laroque noble pedigree, rejected on the grounds that no primary document supports it and the 1669 confirmation register explicitly contradicts it.

Catherine Laporte dit Saint-Georges married Philibert around the fall of 1675 — the earliest possible date under canon law, having reached the canonical age of twelve on 12 October 1675. She outlived him by nearly four decades, managing debts, raising children, enduring a seizure of her wheat crop in 1707, and ultimately remarrying Jean Charpentier at Varennes on 9 October 1706. The parish register records her as "veuve de feu Jean Couillault" — the priest wrote the wrong given name. She died 11 April 1737, in Varennes, approximately seventy-three years old. Her story is inseparable from his.