Francoise Garnier

Biography

Françoise Garnier grew up in a household whose resources can still be counted. The 1681 census recorded her parents, François Garnier and Jacqueline Freslon, with seven cattle, two guns, and fifteen arpents under cultivation. Several children shared the home. This brief inventory gives substance to the farming family from which Françoise came.

She had been born on October 17, 1668 and baptized at Sillery, now part of Québec city on the St. Lawrence River in Canada, the following day. Her mother's surname also appears as Frelon. Françoise was eighteen when she married Michel Desorcy at Neuville, farther upstream on the river’s north bank, on January 7, 1687.

The couple's children arrived across more than two decades. Their first daughter, Marie-Françoise, was born in November 1687. The records also preserve losses: that daughter was buried in 1703, and little Charlotte, born in 1710, was buried in 1712. Other children lived to establish households of their own.

Françoise's parental family remained associated with Neuville. Her mother was buried there in April 1712 and her father in January 1719. Meanwhile, her husband's work as a clerk and fur merchant placed commerce alongside the agricultural background of her childhood.

The surviving record supports a substantial life as a daughter of a farming household and the mother of a large Neuville family, without supplying a dependable date for her death.