Providence Sunday Journal (To purchase a copy of the article)  05/12/2002

BY JOHN HILL Journal Staff Writer 

  It's weird, Jacqueline Lonchay said, driving through Woonsocket, seeing  dozens of people she doesn't know, thinking that she and they may have a  great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother or two in common.
 That's because if you have a French Canadian surname, it's almost certain  that when you track your family tree back about 400 years, you'll end up with  the Filles du Roi.
 The Filles du Roi -- in English, the King's Daughters -- were about 700 women  who emigrated from France to Quebec between 1663 and 1673. They gave up their  lives in the Old World to marry men they had never met and spend the rest of  their lives building homes and raising families in New France.
 To genealogists, the King's Daughters are a dynastic motherlode, a specific  group that has, over generations, yielded millions of modern-day French  Canadians. To French Canadians, they are patriotic icons, revered as the  literal mothers of the French culture in the Americas.
 It WAS THE LATE 1600s and Louis XIV had a problem. His country was trying to  protect its holdings in North America from the encroaching English to the  south and angry native inhabitants all around.
 Soldiers sent there were willing to stay in exchange for land, but it was,  well, lonely. Louis's ministers realized the best defense was a heavily  populated, thriving colony.
 "The soldiers settled, but there is no way they are going to stay without  women," said Peter Gagné, author of King's Daughters and Founding Mothers, a  two-volume history of the women published by Quintin Publications of  Pawtucket.
 "They said this is a nice place, but where are the women?" Gagné said. "It's  like when I'm going out with my buddies. We go to a bar, we go in, it's nice  but hey, there are no women."
 So the message went out: Quebec needs women. The government became a  matchmaker par excellence, recruiting women in their late teens and early 20s  from orphanages, poor houses, the petty nobility and country parishes.
 At first, recruits came from the cities, but Mother Marie l'Incarnation,  superior of the Ursuline convent in Quebec City where many of the girls  stayed after their arrival, wrote back that city girls didn't work out as  well in the countryside.
 "From now on, " Marie l'Incarnation wrote in 1668, "we only want to ask for  village girls who are as fit for work as men, experience having shown that  those who are not raised [in the countryside] are not fit for this country."
 Aesthetics did enter into the equation.
 "It would be good to strongly recommend that the girls destined for this  country not be disfigured by Nature in any way, that they have nothing  repulsive about the exterior," wrote Intendant Jean Talon, the colony's  administrator, in 1667, "that they be strong and healthy for country work or  that they at least have some aptitude for household chores."
 Many of the women knew what kind of life they had to look forward to in  France and it wasn't pretty. More than half of the King's Daughters had lost  one or both parents, Gagné said, and many were living in charitable  institutions with little hope of advancing in society.
 Others were from large rural peasant families and welcomed the chance for a  new start on a farm of their own.
 They were women like Jeanne Fauconnier, a 17-year-old cobbler's daughter from  Orleans, whose father had died. Or Jeanne Dodier and Elisabeth De  Lagueripiere, who both lost their mothers and fathers while they were in  their early 20s, and both decided to take a chance on the wilds of New France.
 IN THE 1600s, hunting was a walk in the woods, Gagné said. But housework was  brutal.
 "They had to do everything," he said of the frontier women. "Like the  laundry, they had to do it with these large gigantic cast iron things that  had to be put in the fireplace, they had to fill them with water. They had to  go out and help with the crops."
 Lonchay sat at the kitchen table with her daughter Samantha Beaudet, 16, on a  warm afternoon two weeks ago, studying the genealogical charts of their  family and the short biographies of the King's Daughters they had found.
 Sitting in a heated house with a television and VCR ensconced in the corner  of the living room, Lonchay said she could not even conceive of how her  forebears endured those early years.
 "You wonder what the hardships were like," Lonchay said. " . . . Did they  have houses built? Did they have neighbors? Were you 10 miles from the  nearest neighbor? If someone was sick, what did you do?
 "Losing a child now, you can't comprehend it," she said, as she imagined  Jeanne Fauconnier, burying her newborn daughter, or Jeanne Amiot, seeing five  of her eight children die before their 13th birthdays.
 "You wonder how they went on after that," she said. "I couldn't go on,  picking up my life; and they did it. I don't understand how."
 Her daughter Samantha said it put complaining about having to empty the  clothes dryer in a new perspective.
 PEOPLE IN 17th-century France would be astounded by 21st-century ideas of  romantic marriage. Back then, virtually all marriages, from the nobility to  the peasantry, were set up by the two families. Refusal to marry meant a  one-way ticket to the convent.
 But the King's Daughters were different. They had a special right that other  Frenchwomen of their time did not: When a man asked a King's Daughter to  marry, she could say no.
 For volunteering to move to New France, a land where men outnumbered women by  about 15 to 1, the king gave these women the right to question their suitors,  and to refuse a proposal if they found the supplicant inadequate. They were  most interested in whether the man had a house.
 "The smartest [among suitors] began making a habitation (house) one year  before getting married, because those with an habitation find a wife easier,"  wrote Marie l'Incarnation. "It's the first thing that the girls ask about,  wisely at that, since those who are not established suffer greatly before  being comfortable."
 The inquisition/courtship interviews would occur in the late fall, after the  harvest was in, said Silvia Bartholomy of the American-French Genealogical  Society in Woonsocket, which has one of the most extensive archives of  French-Canadian genealogical records in the country.
 By then the recently arrived King's Daughters would have spent the previous  weeks or months in the care of the Urseline nuns, learning sewing, farm tools  and how to use herbs for medicines.
 The young woman would be seated at a table, with a nun on one side and a  notaire -- an official recorder for any marriage contract -- on the other.  Bartholomy said the nun and notaire would be able to offer the young woman  their own insights.
 "The nun might lean over and whisper 'he drinks,' " Bartholomy said.
 Once a woman accepted a proposal, the couple would sign a marriage contract  drawn up by the notaire. It would stipulate what each party was bringing to  the marriage, and in case of annulment, the woman would get her goods back.
 The men weren't just looking for companionship. The government of New France  had its own ways of encouraging family values.
 Single men were about as welcome as wolves in the new colony, and the  government used carrots and sticks to get them to marry.
 According to Francis Parkman, a late-1800s historian who wrote about the the  French in the Americas, men were given a bounty of 20 livres on top of any  dowry if they married before the age of 20. Women got the bounty for marrying  before age 16.
 Fathers whose children who had not married by the bounty ages were fined and  had to appear before a local magistrate every six months to explain the  delays. Unmarried men were forbidden to hunt, fish or trade with the natives  or to go into the woods for any reason.
 The single men of the colony got the message, and after an arrival of King's  Daughters, there up to 30 marriages at a time.
 The incentives didn't end on the wedding day. By royal decree, a couple with  10 children would be given a pension of 300 livres a year (Gagné estimates  that would be roughly $4,200 a year in 2001 dollars, compared to today's  $2,900 standard per-child income tax deduction); those with 12 got 400 livres.
 The King's Daughters program ended in 1673, Gagné said, mostly because, at  about $1,400 -- in 2001 dollars -- per daughter in transportation and  dowries, it had gotten expensive.
 By then the effort had already literally begun bearing fruit. In 1670, Talon  reported back to Paris that nearly 700 births had been recorded in the  province that year. By 1672, the population had grown to 6,700, almost triple  the 2,500 who were there in 1660.
 Many of the women had families of 6, 8, or 10 children. And if their husbands  died, women of marriageable age were seldom single for long. And the shortage  of marriageable women sometimes created complex family structures.
 TAKE JEANNE AMIOT, one of the King's Daughters in Lonchay's family tree. In  1673, at the age of 22, she left St. Pierre de Losne in Burgundy for Quebec.  That fall she married Nicolas Pion dit Lafontaine, who was 34. They had eight  children together.
 Nicolas was buried on March 3, 1703, when Jeanne was about 52. The next year  she married 26-year-old Francois Chicoine, the son of another King's  Daughter. Jeanne's son Maurice was married to her new husband Francois'  sister Therese Chicoine, which made Jeanne her daughter-in-law's  sister-in-law.
 That kind of trail can be traced because of a bureaucratic obsession in New  France that, unlike other colonies, tracked the identities of wives and  mothers as meticulously as it did husbands and fathers.
 Many of those records are now in this state, in the archives of the American  French Genealogical Society in Woonsocket. The society is an internationally  recognized research center, with microfilmed birth, death and marriage  records from thousands of village churches throughout Quebec in its  collections.
 In the 1860s, French Canadians began migrating from the farms of Quebec to  the mills of New England seeking work. Many of them stayed, creating French  Canadian enclaves throughout the region in such places as Woonsocket, West  Warwick and Fall River, Mass.
 Bartholomy and Gagné said the attention paid to women in general and to the  King's Daughters in particular in French-Canadian records brings some  much-needed balance to the history of the Europeans in the Americas.
 "Almost all genealogy is about men, who founded this town, who discovered  this country, passing the name down," said Gagné, whose own family tree has  more than 80 King's Daughters. "This is a way of getting back to the women."
 "We look back at their time and think things were so weird," Samantha Beaudet  said. "Is it going to be weird to the next generations coming when they look  back at us?"
 "To think of all the people who have roots in Canada, so many of us are  related," Lonchay said. "We're from Canada. When you think of this big  picture, it's really neat that your family is a part of this. Your family did  this."
 * * *
 Further reading on the King's Daughters/Filles Du Roi
 Internet sites:
 American-French Genealogical Society:
 http://www.afgs.org/
 Quintin Publications
 http://www.quintinpublications.com/
 The Virtual Museum of New France
 http://www.vmnf.civilization.ca/
 The museum's Filles Du Roi page:
 http://www.vmnf.civilization.ca/vmnf/popul/filles/s-fil-en.htm
 La Societe de filles du roi et soldats du Carignan Inc.,
 (A King's Daughters Society)
 http://www.fillesduroi.org/
 For more on researching ancestral roots online:
 http://projo.com/specials/genealogy/
 * * *
 Books:
 Kings Daughters and Founding Mothers: The Filles du Roi, 1663-1673 by Peter  J. Gagne, published by Quintin Publications, Pawtucket, 2001.
 A history of the King's Daughters that includes short biographies of nearly  all the women as well as charts showing details such as time of arrival and  husbands.
 The Splendid Century, by W. H. Lewis, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957.
 A survey of what life was like in 17th century France, for the nobility and  the lesser classes.
 * * *
 The marriage contract of Isabelle Hubert and Louis Bolduc, circa 1665
 The future spouses shall not be held accountable for the debts and mortgages  of the other made and created before the solmenity of their marriage. And if  there be any they shall be paid and settled by he who has made and created  them out of his own property.
 The future groom takes the said future bride with her rights names reasons  and actions in whatever place they may be situated and found. And nonetheless  the future bride promises to bring to her future husband the day after their  wedding the equivalent of 400 livres for all her furniture, clothes rings and  jewelry.
 Excerpts from King's Daughters and Founding Mothers, by Peter J. Gagne.