Marguerite Lamain

Biography

Marguerite Lamain's marriage contract carefully separated property that would belong to the new household from property that would remain hers. Drawn up in September 1670, it recorded a contribution of three hundred livres: half would enter the marital community, while half would remain her separate property. A royal gift of fifty livres was also reserved to her side of the family.

Marguerite came from Saint-Vivien in Rouen, in Normandy in northern France, a daughter of Jacques Lamain and Marguerite Deshaies. She arrived in New France as a Fille du roi and married Michel Rognon, a former soldier settled at Dombourg, now Neuville, on the St. Lawrence’s north bank upstream from Québec city in present-day Canada. Their household grew to include six children.

Michel died in November 1684. Marguerite married the miller Pierre Mercier the following January. The new marriage did not dissolve the children's inheritance from their father. According to the Mercier family association's history, half the original holding belonged to those children, leaving Marguerite and Pierre with the other half. The small shares were difficult to use separately, and the couple made donations in exchange for inherited interests while Pierre sought additional land to rent or buy.

Eight more children were born during Marguerite's second marriage, but only two survived beyond early childhood. Alongside those losses, records continued to follow the redistribution of family property. On October 10, 1714, according to the family record, she gave land to her son Charles Rognon. The transaction provides a late, specific record of Marguerite acting within the family whose property arrangements had first been set down more than forty years earlier.