Remembering a group of founding mothers

A fanciful depiction of a group of Filles du Roi arriving in Quebec. - Wikimedia Commons

As with other historically disempowered groups, women tend to get short shrift in history. Observances such as Women’s History Month (which is taking place right now) are intended as a remedy.

A few months ago, I came across a chapter of that history in my own ancestry that certainly seems worthy of more attention. It concerns the huge role women played in founding a major European culture in North America and the fact that they had real personal power as they did. There’s also the fact that they did so under circumstances that must have been unimaginably difficult.

I’m pretty sure my mother’s side of the family is completely — or almost completely — French Canadian. That means most of them have been part of a relatively small group in a relatively remote part of the continent and it seems likely that the great majority of those ancestors have roots in North America going back more than three centuries.

It’s wonderful that because of their relative insularity — and because of the dominance of the Catholic Church in Quebec — millions are now descended from a relatively small group of people about whom birth, death and marriage records survive.

I feel deeply fortunate, especially when you contrast that with so many of our Black neighbors. They were robbed of their ancestry when they were forced aboard slave ships and sailed away and sealed off from memories of their forebears and even their African names. Tragically, they’re forced to live “outside history,” as Ralph Ellison put it.

Among my French Canadian ancestors about whom many records survive were Les Filles du Roi , or The King’s Daughters. Based on what I’ve found on FamilySearch, the genealogical website operated by the Mormon Church, I and my family directly descend from 45 of them and quite likely many more.

The role they played in the European settlement of the continent can’t be overstated.

Samuel de Champlain founded New France in 1608, but the numbers of Europeans in the colony grew slowly because men vastly outnumbered women. They were sailors, soldiers, fishermen and coureurs de bois, who tramped the forest and shot the rapids in pursuit of game and pelts.

That it was a man’s world isn’t hard to understand. If you asked a young Frenchwoman in the mid-17th century where she wanted to spend her adult life, a freezing, howling wilderness likely  wouldn’t be her first choice.

So King Louis XIV created an incentive. Between 1663 and 1673, the crown paid the passage, provided a trousseau and sometimes paid a dowry for women who would make the trip and marry one of the many eligible bachelors waiting in New France. The crown also offered pensions to families who produced 10 or more kids. It wasn’t subtle, but it turned out to be an effective way to populate the colony.

The king had a geostrategic purpose. The French had staked claims to the Ohio Valley, the Great Lakes and what was then the “West.” But the English and Dutch colonies along the Atlantic were growing much more rapidly than New France was and Louis didn’t want to get crowded out of the new world.

Women and girls (they ranged in age from 12 to about 40) took the opportunity the king presented. A few were relatively well born, but most appear to have been orphans or similarly destitute. Most were from cities such as Paris and Rouen. But some were farm girls who were likely better suited to life in a place that to European eyes was empty and wild and about as far from Paris as one could get.

There’s a tradition that the Filles were prostitutes, but this was almost certainly false. In order to be accepted, candidates had to get a parish priest to vouch for their marriageability. And as it happened, it seems that only one woman was cast out in Quebec for engaging in prostitution. That was after her husband’s death, which undoubtedly left her alone and desperate.

Also, it’s just common sense that the disordered life of a 17th Century prostitute would be unsuitable. The point of the whole effort was to populate Quebec, so the government was looking for women and girls who would be stable wives and mothers who would devote their energies to raising families.

In all, about 770 undertook the trip. About 10% died on the way (ship travel was unmitigated hell in the 17th century.) Some made it all the way to Canada and decided to go back to France. It seems that significantly fewer than 700 made it to Quebec, married and started families.

Many, many things about Les Filles du Roi fascinate me.

One is that they’re a way to study the matrilineal branches of our ancestry. Last names are traditionally connected to men in our culture, and that makes it easier to follow the lines of my grandfathers because you can follow the names. Easy, but it’s not good history to write people out of the script who played at least as important a role as the men did.

Can you imagine what it must have been like to pump out more than six children (the average number was about 6.5) on the frozen edge of the Earth, in 1670?

I can’t begin to conceive of the hardships they faced. Many surely died in childbirth. Malnutrition due to a bad harvest or an extra-harsh winter must have always been a possibility. In fact, the Filles’ grand-grandchildren were reduced to eating grass after failed harvests in 1556 and 1557 as the Seven Years War raged about them, Fred Anderson writes in “Crucible of War.”

Infectious disease was probably an even worse threat. Major outbreaks of bubonic plague were still happening then, and the lack of sophisticated medicine must have made even a common cold dangerous. I found one of our Filles, Marguerite Raisin, who died in Montreal on Nov. 21, 1700 — the same day as her husband, Bernard Deniger. One of them might have succumbed to a broken heart when the other died, but I think a deadly shared bug is the more likely culprit.

Many were also subject near-constant attack by Iroquois aligned with the British — especially those unfortunate enough to live in Ville Marie, now the metropolis of Montreal. That violence lasted until a 1701 treaty brought an end to the Beaver Wars .

Despite all the threats, however, survive the Filles du Roi did and in the end, these women transformed Quebec. They increased the European population from about 3,000 when they started arriving in 1663 to 6,700 when the program was ended a decade later. And of course, the increase was only starting. An estimated two-thirds of French Canadian descendants have at least one Fille du Roi as a direct  ancestor, including famous people like Madonna, Angelina Jolie and Hillary Clinton.

Adding to the fascination is that the program gave women power they would never have had in France. In Quebec, The King’s Daughters — not their parents or some priest — decided who they would marry. After they arrived, they stayed in communal settings such as convents and had supervised “dates” as they made their decisions. Once a marriage was contracted — and even after the ceremony — it wasn’t necessarily final. There were annulments when the Filles later found spouses to be incompatible.

In Quebec, where they were no longer beggars, these women got to be choosers.

I don’t for a second believe that these women lived in some laurentian Barbieland. But the king was paying good money to populate his colony and I suppose he aimed to keep the principal populators at least minimally happy. It’s probably foolish to speculate too much about domestic relations at a time so distant, but I assume that in marriages founded on women’s consent, things were more equitable than they otherwise might have been.

Adding to the personal fascination of the Filles is that this was a government program, so there are records — for scores of my ancestors who got to this continent 360 and more years ago.

Some of those records are more complete than others. For some, we know the date and place of their birth, their marriage and their death and a number of other facts besides. To me it’s astounding to know that much about so many ancestors who lived so long ago.

It’s hard to overstate how important these women were to Quebec’s history when you understand how small its population was back then. The Filles played an indispensable role in more than doubling the size of the colony in just 10 years. But even then, the entire French population of Quebec was no more than that of a modern small town (6,700). And you can see from the available information how many of my women ancestors came, married in Quebec City or Montreal or Trois Rivieres and died in places that were just being founded like Boucherville or La Prairie. In a very real sense, they built the place.

Even the places we now know as “cities” were  just tiny settlements at the time. For example, fewer than 1,000 lived in Montreal all the way up to 1700. With so many ancestors sharing the same, even-tinier towns, some surely knew each other — were inevitably neighbors.

Think about that. We know a lot more about their world than they could have conceived of ours. But without them, I and my brother and sisters and cousins and millions of others wouldn’t be. Being the pioneers they were, they must have thought about the future they were building. Building us, in other words.

Some built us more than others. In the case of at least five of my family’s Filles, they’re our ancestors along two or more lines of our ancestry. I found one, Catherine Clerice, on three different branches. It’s hardly surprising. If you live in a town with fewer than a dozen families and they’re having six or more children, lines are going to cross and recross. I’ll bet that from a genetic standpoint, that wasn’t unusual for rural societies of the day. We’re just unusual in that we’re Americans and our French Canadian ancestors mostly preserved their homogeneity into the mid-20th century.

Even now, Quebec is pretty small. With 8.8 million people (20-25% of whom aren’t French Canadian), the entire province has 75% of the population of Ohio. About 6.6 million are descended from the French and if the estimates are correct, about 4.4 million of them are descended from the Filles du Roi.

To me, it’s kind of crazy to think we’re connected to them and the rest of the diaspora through a group of extraordinary women who made their own choices, suffered, survived and thrived in circumstances that would crush me in a week.

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