Robert Choret

Biography

Robert Choret’s life brought together a carpenter’s trade and the complicated business of owning a seigneury. Born in 1648 to Mathieu Choret and Sébastienne Veillon, he belonged to a family already established in the colony. A marriage contract with Madeleine Paradis was drawn up in April 1674. By the 1681 census, their household on Île d’Orléans, the St. Lawrence River island just downstream from Québec city, included three children, seven cattle and fifteen arpents under cultivation. The enumerator identified Robert as a carpenter.

Madeleine died in 1684. Robert subsequently married Marguerite Lerouge, with whom he entered the most legally consequential property transaction of his life. In 1701 he purchased Bonsecours from Marie Miville, widow of Mathieu Amyot. Possession, however, did not settle every claim to the land.

Charles Amyot challenged the transaction. In August 1709 the Conseil supérieur restored a quarter of the seigneury to him, together with responsibility for a quarter of the relevant community debts. Robert’s holding was therefore reduced through a judgment that divided both property and obligations.

In August 1714 Robert and Marguerite sold the remaining three quarters to Pierre-Noël Le Gardeur de Tilly. The sale description measured that portion at fifty-five and a half arpents of frontage and two leagues in depth—a very different scale from the cultivated acreage recorded in Robert’s earlier household census.

Robert died at Sainte-Croix, upstream from Québec city on the St. Lawrence’s south bank, in June 1716. His records preserve both kinds of work that shaped his adult life: making a living through a skilled trade and navigating the contracts, inheritance claims and debts attached to land.