52 Ancestors: #33 Flavie Lepage

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 33rd week of this challenge, I chose Flavie Lepage (1847-1906).

Flavie is my maternal great-great-grandmother and is number 25 in my ancestor list.

Born on 1 December 1847 in St-Constant, Laprairie County, Quebec, Flavie was the eldest of the fourteen children of Narcisse and Flavie (Moquin) Lepage. [1] By the time she married Pierre Desgroseilliers on 7 November 1865, [2] Flavie’s mother had eleven children, and would go on to have three more.

Flavie fille was used to moving from town to town from a young age. Before she married, she, her parents and her siblings lived in three different locations in Laprairie and Châteauguay Counties in southwestern Quebec. After her marriage, Flavie, her husband and their children lived in five different communities in Quebec and Ontario, including Montreal’s Hochelaga district in the early 1890s. [3]

Birds eye view city of Montreal 1889.

Like her mother, Flavie gave birth to a large family – thirteen children – over the course of 24 years. Two died as infants, son Albert in 1873 and daughter Elodia (Azilda) in 1886. The children who reached adulthood and married were Philomème, Joseph, Narcisse, Emma, Euphémie, Prosper, Albert (my great-grandfather), Célestin, Ovide, Dorilla and Marie Célanise.

While taking care of her large brood, Flavie was also godmother to at least six children. Four were her own grandchildren, while the other two were her youngest brother and her husband’s niece.

Flavie’s date of death is a bit of a mystery. Depending on the source, she died on 30 March 1906 [4] or on 1 August 1906 in St-Charles, Ontario. [5] I didn’t find her burial information when I looked at the parish records of St-Charles, Ontario, using Ancestry.ca’s “Ontario, Canada, Catholic Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1747-1967” database. (St-Charles’ records begin in 1905, but they are unfortunately incomplete.) I also searched for her death registration at Ancestry.ca, but couldn’t locate it in the “Ontario, Canada, Deaths, 1869-1938 and Deaths Overseas, 1939-1947” database. Last, I was unsuccessful at finding her death record when I viewed the relevant microfilms at the Archives of Ontario this past May.

Image credit: Library and Archives Canada, online MIKAN no. 4137889.

Sources:

1. St-Constant (St-Constant, Quebec), parish register, 1847, p. 28 recto, entry no. B.126, Flavie LePage [sic] baptism, 2 December 1847; St-Constant parish; digital image, “Quebec Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1967”, Ancestry.ca (http://www.ancestry.ca : accessed 11 August 2007).

2. St-Chrysostôme (St-Chrysostôme, Quebec), parish register, 1865, p. 27 verso, entry no. M.26, Desgroseilliers – Lepage marriage, 7 November 1865; St-Chrysostôme parish; digital image, “Quebec Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1967”, Ancestry.ca (http://www.ancestry.ca : accessed 24 August 2007).

3. “Lovell’s Montreal Directory, For 1891-92 […]”; digital image, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/lovell/index.html : accessed 27 April 2012), 483, “Pierre Desgroseillier [sic]”. Pierre resided at 51 rue Davidson; he was a laborer.

4. St Charles Cemetery (Dunnet Township), digital images (http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~murrayp/sudbury/st_char/public/page0002.htm : accessed 10 August 2014), photograph, grave marker for Flavie Lepage, St-Charles, Ontario. To view Flavie’s gravemarker, click on image “desgros1”.

5. Lionel Séguin, Historique de la paroisse Saint-Charles (Saint-Charles, Ont., 1945: 232); digital images, Our Roots (http://www.ourroots.ca/ : accessed 18 June 2013).

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.