Madeleine Boucher

Biography

Madeleine Boucher helped establish households in two settlements along the St. Lawrence. Baptized at Québec on August 4, 1641, she was a daughter of Marin Boucher and Perrine Mallet. She married Louis Houde in January 1655, while still only thirteen. Their children would grow up during the expansion of French settlement beyond the older communities around Québec.

The family settled at Sainte-Famille on the Île d’Orléans, the St. Lawrence River island just downstream from Québec city in present-day Canada, in 1658. They remained there for more than twenty years, long enough for their household to expand substantially. Family reconstructions identify fourteen children over the course of Madeleine’s marriage.

In 1682 Madeleine and Louis moved again, this time to Sainte-Croix, upstream from Québec city on the river’s south bank, with ten children. The Ursulines granted Louis a concession measuring nine arpents along the river by forty in depth. The family thus exchanged an established island community for a new holding on the south shore. Their youngest daughter, Marie-Angélique, was born after this resettlement.

The Houde property later became part of Sainte-Croix’s religious geography. Land supplied for a chapel in 1694 provided a place around which parish life could develop. Madeleine’s own participation in that decision is not recorded, but the chapel belonged to the landscape of her later years. She had died by October 28, 1709, when the inventory was made.

The burial listing places Madeleine Boucher at Cimetière Sainte-Croix de Lotbinière (1694-1740), Sainte-Croix, Chaudiere-Appalaches Region, Québec, Canada.