Elisabeth Dumontet / Lagrandeur

Biography

Élisabeth Dumontet was born into a family shaped by a journey her mother had never chosen. Her mother, Elizabeth Corse, had been taken captive from Deerfield, in the Connecticut River valley of Massachusetts, in 1704 and remained in Canada. Élisabeth herself belonged to the next generation: she was born at La Prairie, across the St. Lawrence from Montréal in present-day Québec, Canada, on November 12, 1717, the daughter of Jean-Baptiste Dumontet and the woman whose name became Élisabeth Casse or Lacasse in French records.

Her baptism followed on November 14, with Jean Lefort and Marie Delaplante as sponsors. Those names place the infant within the local community as well as within the family created by her mother's earlier displacement.

On May 5, 1732, Élisabeth married François Monet at La Prairie. She was fourteen; he was twenty-five. An earlier marriage had already linked their families: after being widowed, her mother had married François's brother Pierre Monet in 1730. Mother and daughter consequently married brothers, an important distinction when following the two generations through their records.

Élisabeth's children included Jean-Baptiste, Marie-Anne, Catherine, Charlotte, another Élisabeth, and François. The family chronology continues with Joseph-Marie's birth in 1759.

François died in 1762. Élisabeth survived him by nearly five years, dying at Saint-Philippe on February 21, 1767 and being buried two days later. She was forty-nine.