Genevieve Ayotte / Hayot

Biography

Geneviève Hayot’s family can be followed through marriage agreements, parish entries and a census that briefly opens the door onto her household. A daughter of Jean Hayot and Louise Pelletier, she was born around 1658. On October 23, 1673, a marriage contract drawn up by Romain Becquet linked her future to Gabriel Bérard dit Lépine.

By 1681 the couple lived at Dautray, a seigneury on the St. Lawrence’s north bank in the present-day Lanoraie area of Québec, Canada. The census enumerator recorded Geneviève as twenty-five and Gabriel as thirty-eight, ages that do not fit neatly with other evidence about their births. Their household included seven-year-old Louise and an infant Gabriel, only a month old. Four cattle and fifteen arpents under cultivation placed the family within a working agricultural settlement, even though Gabriel is also remembered as a fur trader.

Their family history contains losses as well as births. A daughter, Marie-Élisabeth, born in 1679, died the following year. Later parish records connect the household with Neuville, farther downstream on the same bank near Québec city, where children continued to be born into the opening years of the eighteenth century.

Geneviève outlived Gabriel. On December 14, 1712 she married Jean Turcot at Neuville, beginning another marriage after nearly four decades associated with the Bérard family. Accounts of her later life disagree sharply about when she died.