DL: This is an excerpt from Here to Stay an account of the lives of my seventeenth-century ancestors in New France. Everything in the book is factual or a reasonable surmise (and referenced as such). ___ This book is not a history of New France. It is about some of my ancestors who came here […]

DL: This is an excerpt from Here to Stay an account of the lives of my seventeenth-century ancestors in New France. Everything in the book is factual or a reasonable surmise (and referenced as such).

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This book is not a history of New France. It is about some of my ancestors who came here to stay. I have provided the story of New France only for the light it casts on my people, and so I have left out large portions of that history.

This book about my ancestors in New France could have begun in 1604 with Louis Hébert, my very first ancestor in North America, but I chose to begin with my ancestors in New France who bore names that I have known all my life—my father’s and my mother’s patronyms. It begins therefore in 1662—eleven rather than thirteen generations ago—when Barthélémy Verreault arrives. When Marthe Quittel, his soon-to-be wife sails into Québec harbor three years later, she will become part of the story also. In 1668, we will find Louis Ledoux in Chambly, then known only as Fort Saint-Louis. We will happen upon him quite by surprise on May 20 being slapped gently on the cheek by the autocratic François de Montmorency-Laval, as the pugnacious bishop of Québec confirms sixty-six men whose names are duly recorded on a role—Louis’ is sixteenth on that list.

Unfortunately, he will never reveal to us when he came to New France nor just what he is doing there in Chambly. Louis’s wife, Marie Valiquet, is more easy on us: her birth in the palissaded village of Montréal is documented. She is a Canadienne, a new breed of French.

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For some of my ancestors, it is a very hard story that I must tell. Take the unfortunate Louis Guimond. In June of 1661, he was abducted by the Iroquois as he labored in his fields—plowing to sow the grain that would feed his family through another Canadian winter. (It would have been his fourteenth.)

The unfortunate captive was force-marched to “Iroquoia” in what is now Northern New York and there the wretch was stripped naked and made to run the interminable gauntlet. Having survived that, Louis Guimond was tied to a post in the center of a circle of small firewood. The ring was lit, and Louis began to die—but not quickly. At night, he was taken away—to eat, to sleep, to begin again the next day. He may have lasted two weeks this way, maybe three.

Other men died of felled trees and drowning, while too many women died in childbirth, lacking sanitation, victims of the ignorance of the era’s midwives and of bad fortune. “She who is pregnant,” went the Gascon saying, “has a foot in the grave.”

In all, about ten thousand men and women came here to stay. They toiled relentlessly to survive in this colony three thousand ocean miles away from the mother country.

But I am not telling the story of ten thousand people. I am writing about only of a few—my ancestors.

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For more on my ancestors in New France, click here.