52 Ancestors: #26 Anne Couvent, not Convent

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”.

During the month of June, I’m focusing on distant, immigrant ancestors. And so, for the 26th week of this challenge, I chose Anne Couvent (ca 1601-1675).

Anne Couvent is my 10x great-grandmother and is number 5069 and 7569 in my ancestor list. This double number means that I have two lines of descent from her through my father and my mother.

Anne was born about 1601 (based on her age on the 1666 census of New France) or about 1607 (based on her age on the 1667 census of New France). [1]

She married Philippe Amiot, of an ancient and honorable French family, in about 1625. [2]

Ten years later in about 1635, Anne, her husband and their children, sons Jean and Mathieu, immigrated to Canada, known at this time as the colony of Nouvelle-France. [3]

A third child, son Charles, was born in August 1636. [4]

Philippe died between Charles’ birth and September 1639, when his widow Anne married Jacques Maheu in Quebec. By her second husband, also a French immigrant, Anne had two children. [5]

After Jacques’ death in July 1663, Anne married a third time in September 1666 in Quebec. Her new husband, Etienne Blanchon dit Larose, was a soldier and tailor, originally from Auvergne, France. She and Etienne did not have children. [6]

Anne was in her early 70s when she died on Christmas Day in 1675 in Quebec. [7] She had lived in the colony of New France for forty years.

Quebec (city)

After I prepared this background story, I checked past issues of Mémoires, the quarterly publication of the Société généalogique canadienne-française, of Montreal, to see what else I could find about Anne. I’m glad I did, because I found articles that updated or corrected certain facts about Anne that were once thought accurate. Here are some examples from one of those articles, published in 2007:

• Anne’s place of birth

Anne was born in Estrées in the diocese of Soissons in Picardie, France, according to some genealogical dictionaries like Tanguay. [8] Anne was indeed from that diocese, but from Espié (now Epieds), as seen in her 1639 marriage contract with her second husband. [9]

• Anne’s surname

Anne’s surname is Convent in Tanguay’s dictionary, but in more recent works like the PRDH (Programme de recherche en démographie historique), it is Convent or Couvent. [10] According to authors Gagné and Kokanosky, her surname is Couvent, which is how she is mentioned in her nephew Toussaint Ledran’s marriage contract in 1669. [11]

• Anne’s parents

Anne’s parents’ are named Guillaume Convent and Antoinette de Longval in older sources, but the spelling should be Couvent and de Longueval, respectively. [12]

If you are a descendant of Anne, I encourage you to seek out this well-researched article, filled with many interesting details about Anne, her husbands, her children, and her parentage. There’s even a 15-generation chart showing her line of descent from Louis VIII, King of France, through his son Robert, comte de France and his wife Mathilde de Brabant.

Sources:

Image credit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. no. R9266-1938.

1. René Jetté, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec (Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1983), 12 and 114.

2. Jetté, Dictionnaire, 12. Also, Dictionnaire National des Canadiens Français, 1608-1760, 3 vols. (Montreal: Institut généalogique Drouin, 1958), III: 1359.

3. Roland-Yves Gagné and Laurent Kokanosky, “Les origines de Philippe Amiot (Hameau), de son épouse Anne Couvent et de leur neveu Toussaint Ledran”, Mémoires de la Société généalogique canadienne-française, 58 (printemps 2007): 17; DVD edition (Montreal, QC: SGCF, 2013).

4. Jetté, Dictionnaire, 12.

5. Jetté, Dictionnaire, 752.

6. Jetté, Dictionnaire, 114.

7. Jetté, Dictionnaire, 114.

8. Cyprien Tanguay, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes, 7 vols. (1871–1890, reprint, Montréal: Editions Elysée, 1991), I: 6.

9. Gagné and Kokanosky, “Les origines de Philippe Amiot", 18-19.

10. Gagné and Kokanosky, “Les origines de Philippe Amiot”, 20.

11. Gagné and Kokanosky, “Les origines de Philippe Amiot”, 20.

12. Gagné and Kokanosky, “Les origines de Philippe Amiot”, 19.

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.