52 Ancestors: #20 Angélique Lalonde, a bride at 27 years old

Amy Johnson Crow at No Story Too Small has issued herself and her readers a challenge for 2014. It’s called “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks”, and as Amy explains, the challenge is to “have one blog post each week devoted to a specific ancestor. It could be a story, a biography, a photograph, an outline of a research problem — anything that focuses on one ancestor”.

For the 20th week of this challenge, I chose Angélique Lalonde (1818-1900).

Angélique is my paternal great-great-grandmother and is number 17 in my ancestor list.

She was born on 5 February 1818 in Les Cèdres, Soulanges County, Quebec and received the name Angélique at her baptism the next day. She was known as Angèle on at least three occasions: on the 1851 census, at her son Pierre’s baptism in 1852, and at her son Paul’s marriage in 1887.

Angélique was the second youngest among the twelve children of Jean-Baptiste Lalonde and his wife Angélique Bray. Through her father, Angélique is a descendant of Sarah Allen (Madeleine Hélène), who was brought to New France in 1704 as a Deerfield captive.

Les Cèdres, ca 1840

Angélique’s parents were born and married in Les Cèdres; it’s also where all but their last child was born. When Angélique was a young girl, the Lalonde family moved a little to the west to Côteau-du-Lac. Located in southwestern Quebec, these small rural communities are located on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River.

In June 1842, Angélique’s mother died aged 66 in Côteau-du-Lac. By now, all of Angélique's surviving brothers and sisters were married. She was 24 years old and unmarried. Angélique must have wondered what her prospects were like for a marriage and a family of her own.

I don’t know what prompted my 2x great-grandmother to leave her family and widowed father in Côteau-du-Lac, but by the summer of 1845, she was living in Hull, a logging town on the Ottawa River across the future city of Ottawa, capital of Canada.

At the rather advanced age of 27, Angélique married Paul Janvry dit Belair on 2 September 1845 in Aylmer, near Hull. Her husband was four years younger than she was. (I recently wrote about Paul for 52 Ancestors. You can read his story here.)

The couple’s first child Paul was born in August 1846. He died three months short of his eighth birthday when he drowned in May 1854. Angélique’s third child, daughter Delphine, died when she was only five weeks old, in January 1850.

Angélique and Paul’s other children, most of whom were born in Ste-Cécile-de-Masham, not far from Hull, lived to maturity.

• Joseph, born in 1848, eventually moved to Ontario, where he married and had seven children.

• Pierre, born in 1851, my great-grandfather. He married three times and had 16 children.

• Lucie, born in 1853, also married and had a family.

• Emilien, born in 1855, married a local girl and had 12 children.

• Jean-Baptiste, born in 1856, also married a local girl, and had a family. He followed his elder brother’s example and moved to Ontario.

• Paul, born in 1858, married, had a family and went to live in nearby Hull.

• Youngest child Adélaïde (Adèle), born in 1861, remained in Masham, where she married and had six children.

At about the same time as the Belair family arrived in Masham, Angélique elder sister Geneviève left Soulanges County with her husband Joseph Onézime Legros and their children and established themselves in the same community. It is through this couple, Geneviève and Joseph, that I am a fourth cousin of the Dionne quintuplets, whom I’ve written about in Famous Relatives: The Dionne Quintuplets.

Angélique died on 16 January 1900 in Ste-Cécile-de-Masham. She was buried there two days later in the presence of a large number of family and friends, including her sons Pierre and Emilien.

Image credit: Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, no d'acc 1931-218-1.

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.