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Chapter 1

Three men from Normandy

The French farming village of Saint-Germain-le-Vasson lies about ten miles south of the bustling city of Caen in Normandy. This location near the seacoast placed both the city and the village squarely in the path of the allied Normandy invasion of June 1944. Historic Caen was blasted to smithereens. Advancing armored columns tore through the mostly level fields of crops around it. Today the surrounding countryside also contains sprawling cemeteries full of fallen soldiers from many nations.

A succession of Gallic tribes, Roman legions, Frankish knights and Viking raiders had already left their mark on this contested region. The old parish of St.-Germain-le-Vasson traditionally belonged to the ancient diocese of Bayeux. The cathedral city of Bayeux, about 25 miles northwest of St.-Germain-le-Vasson, occupied a precious niche in the history of medieval Europe.

The violation of a solemn oath of fealty sworn probably under duress there at the altar of the still unfinished cathedral was the sacrilegious act that provoked Duke William of Normandy to invade and conquer AngloSaxon England in 1066. The oath-breaker, at least in William’s eyes, was his disloyal vassal and erstwhile comrade-in-arms, Harold, the earl of Wessex, who reigned briefly as king of England until he perished in battle at Hastings. Visitors from around the world still throng Bayeux each year to view the lofty cathedral and its venerable tapestry crafted by Kentish monks to commemorate the Norman conquest (Annex A).

Tiny St.-Germain-le-Vasson, first mentioned in 1228 as Sanctus Germanus de Wachon, has nothing to match Bayeux’s soaring Romanesque-Gothic cathedral. But its own church, with a tall belfry dating from the 14^th Century, is surprisingly massive for a farming village of fewer than a thousand souls. It is also a fitting point of departure for our own New World story, although the family surname can no longer be detected on the weathered tombstones leaning at drunken angles in the churchyard. From this bucolic parish, according to an early church record of colonial Québec, came the pioneering émigré named Pierre Roberge, our direct paternal ancestor. Two other Roberge men, an older brother and a supposed half-brother, also crossed the Atlantic to Canada at roughly that same time about 350 years ago.

The French surname, Roberge, first appeared in civil and church records of New France around 1660 upon the arrival from Normandy of an educated marchand bourgeois named Denis Roberge. Two younger men, both named Pierre Roberge, then entered Quebec’s annals when they were confirmed as practicing Catholics in 1664 and 1665 respectively. No other men with their surname ever came to Canada during the French colonial era, the records show.

All three Roberge men appeared in Quebec census reports of 1666, 1667 and 1681 for Quebec’s capital region, Comté de Montmorency. Each man married and raised a large family. The descendants of Denis Roberge, oldest of the three, can no longer be traced in North America. But those of the two Pierres number in the thousands today.

Thought to have been brothers, the two Pierres have often been confused with one another. Differentiating nicknames, La Croix and La Pierre, are usually added to tell their two collateral families apart. Both men homesteaded permanently on Ile d'Orléans, a large island in the St. Lawrence River within sight of fortress Québec. Denis Roberge, a prominent Catholic layman who served the vicar of Québec, seems to have been a patron of one or both younger men, giving rise to a belief that he was their older half-brother.

The youngest of this trio from Normandy was the man who implanted our direct paternal family line (Annex B) in the New World. This Pierre Roberge, first of the La Pierre branch, was one of twelve Catholics confirmed at the main parish of Notre Dame de Québec on 7 November 1665. The event generated the first written mention of the ancestor in colonial records. He would have been about 14 years old.

The first seven North American generations of male descendants of Pierre Roberge, born ~1651:

Pierre Roberge [m. 1679 Ste. Famille, Ile d'Orléans, Québec] Françoise Loignon

Pierre Roberge [m. 1726 Chateau Richer, Québec)] Marie Le François

Prisque Roberge [m. 1761 St. Pierre, Ile d'Orléans] Agathe Goulet

Ambroise Roberge [1^st m. 1793 St. Laurent, Ile d'Orléans] Louise Pouliot

Jean Roberge [m. 1826 Ste. Claire, Dorchester, Québec] Christine Bourgault

François Roberge [2^nd m. 1870 St. Alphonsus, Glens Falls, New York] Marcelline Boisvert

Edouard Roberge aka Edward B. Roby [m. 1905 Troy, New York] Mary Ellen Dwyer

Described in the 1666 Talon census as an 18-year-old weaver of cloth, our man would be the bachelor who later married local teenager Françoise Loignon in Ste.-Famille parish of Ile d'Orléans on 3 July 1679 and then sired her 13 children. The marriage record¹ in the parish registry says this Pierre Roberge was the son of Jacques Roberge and Claudine Buret, or Borel, of the parish of St.-Germain-le-Vasson in the diocese of Bayeux.

Since the same parents and parish in Normandy had been given for the other Pierre Roberge at his first marriage on 22 October 1672 in the same island parish, the two men are believed to have been brothers from what is now the Caen district of Normandy’s modern department of Calvados. Roberge remains a fairly common surname in that northwestern corner of France. And the former province of Normandy was the origin of at least one in five early settlers of colonial New France.

Doubt about the origin of the two Pierres

Nevertheless, a shadow of doubt lengthens over the actual origin, parentage and background of our 17^th-Century patriarch. Authoritative genealogists either disagree or have grown uncomfortable with crucial facts about the two Pierres and their Norman French parents. Fichier Origine, keeper of Quebec's hallowed list of early pioneers based on cooperative research done in their European home parishes and archives, no longer lists the three Roberge men as emigrés. This means that no reliable trace of them can be found in France.

Both Pierres lack baptismal certificates. Québec’s church marriage documents state that they, unlike the educated Denis Roberge, were unable to sign their names. No ship’s manifest shows either one ever arriving from France alone or accompanied. And this was a passage that our ancestor, the younger of the two, would have to have made as a youth of no more than 14 years.

In the late 19^th Century, a trailblazing opus of Quebec genealogist Cyprien Tanguay seems to have matched the two Pierres with the wrong wives.² The identical names of the two patriarchs invite confusion. Nor did it help that a second-generation Pierre, the son of our Lapierre patriarch, would eventually marry a young woman of the same Le François family as her aunt, the wife of Pierre, the Lacroix patriarch. Tanguay was also silent on the origin of our ancestor, noting only the common French place of origin for Denis Roberge and for the older Pierre.

A century later, University of Montréal genealogist René Jetté seems have sorted out the spouses of the brothers Pierre Roberge.³ His version makes sense because it comports with the 1681 census that lists the two Roberge couples with their ages. Jetté identified the thrice-married older brother, Pierre Roberge dit Lacroix, as a half-brother of Denis Roberge. They seem to have had a different mother but the same father. Jacques Roberge of the diocese of Bayeux supposedly had first married Denis’ mother, Andrée Le Marchand, in France around 1627.

The idea that Denis Roberge was the half-brother of the two younger men has also been abandoned by Programme de Recherche en Démographie Historique (PRDH), Québec's authoritative genealogy databank. Internet genealogy organizations Nos Origines and Wikitree take note of this change. Quebec’s Nos Origines now describes Jacques Roberge, the supposed father of all three Roberge émigrés, as d'origine inconnue – a person of unknown origin. Apparently, as Fichier Origine found, neither Jacques nor his two supposed wives ever cast a shadow in the New World and left no trace on the other side of the Atlantic. One might even wonder, with Tanguay, whether the two Pierres really were sons of the same father and mother.

Denis Roberge is known to have married Geneviève Aubert at Chateau Richer sometime during the period 1667-1669. Parents of the Quebec-born bride were Beauport royal notary Claude Aubert and Jacqueline Lucas, whom Métis historian Dick Garneau said was English. Thomas Morell, a priest who had sailed with Denis from France in 1660, conducted that wedding. This can be gleaned from an undated parish notice of the marriage, edited by a different priest, François Fillon, and from a civil marriage contract made at an unspecified location in Québec and dated 3 June 1667.⁴

The official paper trail for Pierre Roberge dit La Croix also looks suspicious – until his third marriage in 1684. Properly signed marriage certificates for his first two unions are missing. There is only an unsigned notice from 22 October 1672 that names Denis Roberge as a witness to Pierre’s first marriage with Antoinette De Beaurenom in the parish of Ste.-Famille, I.O., which was still technically in the orbit of the main parish of Notre-Dame-de-Québec.

This French first wife, the daughter of Guillaume De Beaurenom and Françoise Le Poupet of Normandy’s diocese of Coutances, seems to be the same woman also called Bagot or Bagau and sometimes Bascon in other documents, including a civil marriage contract written by Beauport seigneurial notary Paul Vachon. Antoinette must have died childless.

Roberge’s second marriage, to Marie Chabot, daughter of Mathurin Chabot and Marie Mesange, was annulled 8 January 1684, according to a civil document cited by Jetté. Therefore all of this Pierre’s seven children came from his third marriage in 1684 to Marie Le François, daughter of Charles Le François and Marie Triot, or Triaut, from Chateau Richer, Quebec.

As Tanguay noted, Denis Roberge was a “confiant de François [de Montmorency] Laval, monseigneur”, the vicar of Québec. He was also involved with Laval’s Séminaire de Québec, directed by Henri de Bernières. As the vicar’s principal deputy, this priest became the first resident pastor of the main parish, Notre Dame de Québec. Laval, remembered as Quebec’s first bishop, had sailed to Canada in 1659, accompanied by Henri De Bernières. Denis Roberge followed them in 1660. All three men had previously been instructed in Caen at a lay seminary run by De Bernières’ uncle.

The common parentage and origin of the two illiterate Pierres has long been treated as academic doctrine. The sole source of this information may have been Denis Roberge, the church official from Bayeux who apparently vouched for the older Pierre at his 1672 wedding and again in 1684. He would have been a highly credible source for local parish priests who were well aware of Denis’ close association with the supreme ecclesiastic authorities he served.

Denis Roberge’s word on the background of the two Pierres may be perfectly factual. But it retains a whiff of genealogical hearsay as long as Fichier Origine, the seasoned research team of Federation québecoise des sociétés de généalogie, cannot find any such family in French archives.

Ethnic label in the parish registry

The quandary of the identity of the Roberge brothers goes deeper. A surviving document recording the third marriage of the older Pierre implies that he was native American. Its existence was generously called to our family’s attention by an historian of the Anderdon Nation, Wyandotte/Wyandot/Wendat (Huron) confederation.

This unsigned parish certificate is part of a 17^th Century parish marriage registry transcribed in a parish scribe’s uniform penmanship from the original marriage acts written by different priests who actually gave the blessings to the wedding couples. It includes the 10 April 1684 marriage of Pierre Roberge and Marie Le François at the parish of Chateau Richer. Appearing in the left-hand margin under the names of the couple, as with a few other nuptials in this parish registry, is the descriptive word “aboriginal”.

A proprietary image of the archived Canadian document, shared under international licensing terms, may be viewed on internet ancestry research sites in North America. In lieu of the protected image, the transcribed text of the scribe’s true copy can be rendered roughly as follows:

Identically worded but less legible was the original marriage certificate. This document⁵ from Chateau Richer translates as follows:

The year one-thousand six-hundred eighty-four, the tenth day of April, following the engagement and the publication of the banns of marriage read on three consecutive Sundays between Pierre Roberge, widower of the late Antoinette Bagot, of the parish of St. Paul, age fortyseven years, for the one party; and Marie LeFrançois, daughter of Charles LeFrançois and Marie Trio, his wife, of age twenty-five for the other party; and having found no impediments, I the undersigned priest, pastor of this parish, having received their mutual consent to the proposed marriage, have given the nuptial benediction according to the rite prescribed by our Holy Mother the Roman Church in the presence of Charles Le François, Denys Roberge and Felix Auber, who have signed; with said bridegroom Pierre Roberge having declared that he could not sign as required by the ordinance.[translation]

[signatures:] Charles Le François, Denis Roberge, Felix Auber, Guillaume Gaultier, priest

An image of the original is in the collection of Quebec’s Drouin Institute of Genealogy. Written and signed by the parish pastor, Guillaume Gaultier, at Chateau Richer on 10 April 1684, it bears the signatures of Denis Roberge and the two other witnesses mentioned. Unlike the unsigned parish notice regarding this Pierre’s first marriage in 1672, this one makes no mention of the bridegroom’s French origin or parents. If he was aboriginal, perhaps his French surname had been conferred by Denis.

The Chateau Richer marriage registry copy plainly marked “aboriginal” raises obvious questions: Were the Roberge brothers, who suddenly surfaced in the chronicles of New France in the mid-1660s, really just newcomers from France? If not, what were they? Since historic demography leaves hardly another likely choice in an early colonial setting where Europeans were still thin on the ground, one possible answer comes to mind: The brothers were Christian natives. If so, they would most likely have been of the Huron nation. A hypothetical case for that supposition proceeds from historic circumstances:

The two Pierres were among the earliest settlers of Ile d'Orléans, first visited by Jacques Cartier in 1535. The natives called the place Minigo before Cartier renamed the island Bacchus because of its profusion of wild grapevines. The presence of Denis Roberge, who once owned an estate on Ile d'Orléans, dates to 1666, according to a current history of the island.⁶ This source says that our family patriarch was living there by 1669 and his older brother took up residence nearby the following year. A survey map of the island prepared in 1689 by a royal engineer, Sieur de Villeneuve, identifies the houses and lands of both men. Furthermore, Pierre Aloignon, or Loignon, the father-in-law of our paternal ancestor (Annex B), had previously settled on that island after serving an indenture to Noël Juchereau at Chateau Richer beginning 1647. The island’s historic profile informs us that this pioneer was already living there around 1656.

Ile d'Orléans and Wendat refugees

That date merits a second look because Ile d'Orléans at that time was still divided into small farms assigned by the Jesuits to Christianized Amerindians. These initial settlers were refugees – men, women and children of a nation the French called Huron. They called themselves Wendat (Wyandotte, Wyandot) and their tribal homeland lay far to the West in what is now south-central Ontario between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe. The Jesuit missionary fathers at Quebec city envisaged the fertile Ile d'Orléans as a new home for these surviving Christian converts who had fled eastward in their canoes to Quebec in 1650.⁷

The conversion of the Wendat people of the Great Lakes had been an early obsession with the French missionary orders because these native Americans were highly regarded as intelligent and civilized aboriginals. Traditionally they lived in temporary villages of long houses and raised food crops, supplemented by seasonal hunting and fishing. Their culture and language were closely related to that of the five Iroquois nations south of Lake Ontario. The Wendat confederation north of lakes Huron and Erie quickly staked out a pivotal role as intermediaries in French trading with more remote tribes. This seemingly gainful association with the newcomers eventually proved their undoing.

Devastated by deadly European contagions, the once-powerful Wendat confederation gradually lost cohesion in the 1640s amid factional strife between traditionalists and those who embraced the religion of the French. Incessant attacks by their heathen Iroquois cousins then precipitated the collapse and dispersal of the remaining Wendat. Panic scattered them in all directions. The flight of some Wendat converts and their missionaries to Quebec in 1650 marked the end of a once promising Great Lakes tribal mission first launched by Joseph Le Caron (1586-1632) and his Franciscan Recollet priests in 1616.

The new homeland on Ile d'Orléans also proved vulnerable to Iroquois raids against the French and their native allies. A couple of displaced Wendat clans eventually chose to save themselves by leaving the island. Some accepted an invitation to join the Iroquois confederation. But chronicles also reveal that one group of settlers belonging to the clan of the Cord sought safety among the French in 1657 at Fort St. Louis, a fortified corner of Québec city.

The path to assimilation in the colonial society of New France began at the church. Given their apparent links to Denis Roberge, the two Pierres presumably benefited from his position with the Séminaire de Québec, which held title to much of Ile d'Orléans starting 1666. Tanguay described Denis Roberge as a devout Catholic layman from Bayeux who sailed to Canada with the priest, [Thomas] Morell, in 1660 in order to serve Quebec’s apostolic vicar and later its first bishop, François de Montmorency-Laval.⁸

Denis had been a student and servant of de Bernières, wrote Tanguay, referring to Catholic mystic Jean de Bernières, founder of l'Ermitage de Caen, where both his nephew Henri and Denis Roberge had trained, and where his close friend, Laval, had also studied. Given this intensely religious orbit, it wouldn't be unthinkable that young and promising Christian natives, maybe also the two Pierres, had been temporarily dispatched for instruction there before Jean died in 1659.

Though speculative, the scenario is not far-fetched. The presence of acculturated Hurons at many St. Lawrence settlements, including Beauport and Quebec, is on record. An historic Wendat community dating from 1697 still thrives next to the capital city at Jeune-Lorette. A number of displaced Huron families had also moved onto the nearby Sillery réduction for aboriginal Christians as early as 1673. They were still living there when Louis XIV granted a new seigneurial charter solely to the Jesuits in 1699.

The 1647 royal charter of this mission seigneurie had specifically given it to “néophyte sauvages chretiens” under Jesuit supervision. The king annulled this grant after being told that the original Algonquin and Montagnais residents had abandoned the reservation. But the ancient charter granted during the regency of Louis’ mother, Anne d'Autriche, still underpins a legal claim to Sillery that the Hurons continue to assert today, despite rejections and rebuffs by successive governments.⁹

A number of researchers have also seen signs of a Huron presence on Ile d'Orléans after 1657. It is argued, for example, that the island couple Pierre Blais and Anne Perrault, neighbors of the Roberge, were actually Hurons. This couple married 1669 at Ste. Famille parish, Ile d'Orléans, and raised some of their 10 children there. A couple of their descendants even married into the Roberge lines.

The family background of the wife of our Pierre Roberge dit La Pierre may hold a clue, since her father was reportedly already living on the island in 1656. Françoise Loignon would be of mixed blood because her mother, Françoise Roussin, was métisse, wrote historian Dick Garneau in “New France 1650-1653” of his chronological series. Françoise Roussin, born about 1631, was the daughter of Jean Roussin de Tourouvre, who died 1643 at Trois Rivières, said Garneau. He said that this sparsely documented Jean could have been the son of Nicolas Roussin, who joined Champlain in Quebec in 1619 and whose family was likely deported to France in 1629 during a brief English takeover.¹⁰ He was indeed one of 80 early recruits for Quebec listed by Admiral Henri II de Montmorency, who was in charge of France’s oversees colonies in the 1620s.

A genealogy published by Université de Caen on the Roussin family tells a different story. Here, Françoise Roussin (1631-1691) and three other children of Jean Roussin (1597-~1681) and Madeleine Giguère (1605-~1650) were baptized at Saint-Aubin church in Tourouvre, Perche, in France, and followed their father to Canada after 1650 as indentured servants. But a 12 June 1622 marriage certificate of the parents at Saint Aubin identifies the bride as Jeanne, not Madeleine. Other references cite more than one Jean Roussin.

Certain at least is that Françoise Roussin married Perche emigré Pierre Loignon at fort Québec on 8 October 1652. Françoise Loignon, the wife of our Pierre Roberge, was one of this couple’s 12 children.¹¹ This prolific pair launched one of Canada’s enduring first families.

There are more than four thousand persons in North America today with the common Roberge surname or such derivatives as Roby. Most, if not all, would have to trace their paternal line directly to one of the two Pierres of Ile d'Orléans, where direct descendants can still be found. Even in colonial times the island became crowded enough to boast five parishes chartered between 1666 and 1680.

The Roberge surname has spread far and wide through Canada and the United States but is especially well represented in the parishes around Quebec city. The direct line now known as Roby migrated to the northeastern United States in the late 19^th Century from a quiet corner of Quebec located north of frontier with western Maine and New Hampshire. The particular Roberge dit Lapierre family tree reconstructed in this manuscript relies largely on the updated database of the University of Montreal's PRDH, now managed by Institut généalogique Drouin.

–

Notes:

1 Programme de recherche en démographie historique (PRDH), Université de Montréal. PRDG-IGD's marriage #32659, with underlying Institut généalogique Drouin image _d1p_30780121.jpg, is apparently the registry entry for the marriage of Pierre Roberge dit La Pierre and Françoise Loignon at Ste. Famille parish, Ile d'Orléans, on 3 July 1679. The four-line certificate at the foot of the right-hand page, of which the corner is damaged and missing, is scarcely legible. A family sheet for this union is PRDH-IGD #4843.

2 Tanguay, Cyprien, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes depuis la fondation de la colonie jusqu'a nos jours (DGFC), vol. 1, É. Sénécal, Montréal: p. 521. Citing Auguste Gosselin's 1890 book Vie de Mgr. Laval, p. 22, Tanguay describes Denys as an éleve et domestique of de Bernières [Jean de Bernières, founder of l'Ermitage de Caen]. DGFC, vol. 1, p. 521

3 Jetté, René. Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec des origines à 1730 (DGFQ). Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1983: pp. 992-993

4 Ibid.

5 PRDG-IGD's marriage #30228, with underlying Institut généalogique Drouin image _d1p_30791511.jpg, is the priest's signed original certificate for the marriage of Pierre Roberge dit La Croix and Marie Le François at Chateau Richer on 10 April 1684. An unexplained image of what appears to be a similar document signed by Charles Amador Martin was found on the site, Family Search. Martin was the parish pastor at Beauport, the seigneurie of Robert Giffard, the Champlain-era veteran who recruited Canada's second wave of French colonists starting 1632.

6 Dates of arrival on Ile d'Orleans are given for 317 families at <https://www.quebeciledorleans.com/en/discover/genealogy>; the three Roberge families are among about three dozen with commemorative monuments on the island, sometimes called the cradle of New France.

7 Peace, Thomas and Kathryn Magee Labelle. From Huronia to Wendakes – Adversity, Migrations and Resilience 1650-1900. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 2016: p. 7; see also <http://tourisme.iledorleans.com/liledorleans/histoire-de-lile-dorleans/>; and, Labelle, Kathryn Magee. Dispersed But Not Destroyed. University of British Columbia Press, 2014, for historic background on the Wendat/Huron nations, their collapse and diapora.

8 Tanguay, DGFC, vol. 1, p. 521. Citing Auguste Gosselin's 1890 book Vie de Mgr. Laval, p. 22, Tanguay describes Denys as an elève and domestique de M. de Bernières [Jean de Bernières, founder of l'Ermitage de Caen]. He says Denys went to Canada with M. Moral as donné in 1660, became „confiant de François [de Montmorency] Laval, monseigneur“ and served the church until his death in 1709.

9 Lavoie, Michel. C'est ma seigneurie que je réclame. La lutte des Hurons de Lorette pour la seigneurie de Sillery, 1650-1890. Boréal, Montréal 2010

10 Garneau, Dick. “New France 1650-1653”. <www.metishistory.info/french15.shtml> and <www.metis-history.info/french6.shtml>

11 “Famille Roussin et Giguère” <http://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/prefen/notices/ 12779jr.pdf>; see also Jetté, DGFQ: pp. 738-739