Louise Laroche

Biography

Louise Laroche's family history contains two marriages and children bearing two surnames. The daughter of Jean-Baptiste Rognon and Suzanne Choret, she was born at Sainte-Croix, on the St. Lawrence’s south bank upstream from Québec city in present-day Québec, Canada, on March 12, 1748. Her recorded surname appears as Laroche and, in a later burial reference, Larosches.

She married François Plante at Yamachiche on April 8, 1771. Their children included Marguerite and a younger François. When her husband died in May 1779, Louise was thirty-one and their son was only a little over a year old.

Nearly six years later, on February 7, 1785, she married Jean-Charles Leclerc at the community now called Louiseville, near the north shore of the St. Lawrence’s Lake Saint-Pierre. A daughter, Marie Leclerc, was born in February 1786.

Louise died in October 1801. The burial reference cited in her genealogy identifies Marie-Louise Larosches as Jean-Charles Leclair's wife and dates the burial to October 31 at Louiseville. The variant spellings preserve the names as they were recorded in different parts of her life.