52 Ancestors: #39 Marguerite Lacasse

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 39th week of this challenge, I chose Marguerite Lacasse (1839-1907).

Marguerite is my maternal great-great-grandmother and is number 31 in my ancestor list.

With this article, I’ve now written a blog post about all my ancestors from my parents through my great-great-grandparents for the "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" challenge. For the remaining weeks, I’ll write about other ancestors that I'll choose at random.

Born on a spring day, Marguerite was baptized when she was five days old on 28 April 1839 in Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours church in Montebello, located in the Petite-Nation seigneurie on the banks of the Outaouais (Ottawa) River. [1] Her parents Pierre and Thérèse (Doyer) Lacasse already had four children and would have five more after Marguerite.

Location of Petite-Nation seigneurie (in purple in top left corner) [2]

The Lacasse family appeared on the 1842 census of Canada East (now the province of Quebec) enumerated in Petite-Nation, the seigneurie owned by Louis-Joseph Papineau. [3]

Louis-Joseph Papineau*

* Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1986-36-1, MIKAN no. 2834250.

The 1842 census is partly nominal and records only the names of heads of households, which means that Marguerite (who was not yet three years old) was recorded as one of three unnamed females five years of age and under in her father’s household. The family lived on a 120 acre property.

At the age of twenty-five, Marguerite married Louis Hotte, a farmer, on 27 March 1864 in St-André-Avellin. [4] Not only were they distantly related (fifth cousins), but Marguerite was five years older than Louis. [5]

Over the course of the next twenty years, Marguerite gave birth to eleven children – six sons and five daughters. Eight survived childhood and married, but three sons, Napoléon, Joseph Adélard and Gédéon, died young.

By 1877, Marguerite and Louis had relocated to Chénéville, where my great-grandmother Olivine was born that January. This small rural community, a little to the north of St-André-Avellin, would now be the family’s home, where all the (surviving) Hotte children married.

Marguerite was twenty days short of her sixty-eighth birthday when she passed away on 3 April 1907 in Chénéville. [6] She was buried there two days later in the parish cemetery in the presence of “un grand nombre de parents et [d’amis]” [a large number of family and of friends], including her younger son Adrien. [7]

Sources:

1. Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours (Montebello, Quebec), parish register, 1815-1900, p. 145 verso, entry no. B.31 (1839), Marguerite Lacoste [sic] baptism, 28 April 1839; Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours parish; digital image, “Quebec Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1967”, Ancestry.ca (http://www.ancestry.ca : accessed 1 May 2008). Montebello is now in Papineau County, Quebec.

2.“Manoir-Papineau National Historic Site of Canada”, Parks Canada (http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/qc/manoirpapineau/index.aspx : accessed 13 September 2014), “A Bit of History: The Seigneury of La Petite-Nation”.

3. 1842 census of Canada East, Ottawa District, Petite-Nation (seigniory), p. 1262 (stamped), line 29, Pierre Lacoste [sic] household; Library and Archives Canada microfilm C-729. Louis-Joseph Papineau (1786-1871) acquired Petite-Nation from his father in 1817.

4.St-André-Avellin (St-André-Avellin, Quebec), parish register, 1864, p. 49 recto, entry no. M.6, Louis Hotte – Marguerite Lacasse marriage, 27 March 1864; St-André-Avellin parish; digital image, “Quebec Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1967”, Ancestry.ca (http://www.ancestry.ca : accessed 27 March 2008).

5. Marguerite and Louis are fifth cousins through their common ancestors Guillaume Labelle (ca 1649-1710) by his wife Anne Charbonneau (1657-1729).

6. St-Félix-de-Valois (Chénéville, Quebec), parish register, 1905-1913, p. 183 verso, entry no. S.6, Marguerite Lacasse burial, 5 April 1907; St-Félix-de-Valois parish; digital image, “Quebec Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection), 1621-1967”, Ancestry.ca (http://www.ancestry.ca : accessed 18 February 2008).

7. St-Félix-de-Valois, parish register, 1905-1913, p. 183 verso, Marguerite Lacasse burial, 5 April 1907. Although Marguerite’s husband Louis survived her, his name is not mentioned as one of the witnesses who were present at her burial.

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.