Angelique Giguere

Biography

Angélique Giguère was born at Sainte-Famille on the Île d’Orléans, an island in the St. Lawrence just downstream from Québec city in Canada, in February 1761, a daughter of Étienne Giguère and Catherine Ratté. On February 7, 1780 she married Pierre-Chrysologue Deblois in the same parish. The family compilation gives the same day for her birth, but its citation is to a baptismal record, so the birthday coincidence remains uncertain.

Their family grew through the 1780s and early 1790s. Among the daughters named in the records are Marie-Louise, who married Charles Bergeron, and Madeleine, who married Joseph Biron. Their son Pierre lived only from January to June 1791. The family’s later entries connect them with the community now called Louiseville, near Lake Saint-Pierre, where Marie-Louise married in 1801 and Angélique’s husband died in 1820.

Angélique lived on until November 19, 1840, when her death was recorded at Pointe-du-Lac. She was seventy-nine. Her life therefore reaches across several stages of the family’s history: an island childhood and marriage, children establishing households farther west, and two decades of widowhood.