Marguerite Maclin / Maquelain

Biography

Marguerite Maclin appears in Marguerite Bourgeoys's account of the companions who came to Canada in 1659: a young girl whom Bourgeoys identified by her later marriage to Nicolas Boyer. The reference places her within a particular travelling party, years before that marriage and before the royal recruitment programme usually associated with the Filles du roi.

She came from Sézanne-en-Brie in Champagne, east of Paris in France. Her first Canadian marriage was to Jean Sicot, also written Chicot or Sicotte, at Montréal, on the St. Lawrence River in present-day Québec, Canada, on October 23, 1662. Their daughter Catherine was born the following year, and their son Jean in 1666. By the summer of 1667 Marguerite was a widow with two young children.

On July 3 she made a marriage contract with Nicolas Boyer before the notary Bénigne Basset. The wedding followed on August 8. Nicolas was a carpenter, and the household that developed around them included children from both marriages. In the 1681 census, Catherine and Jean Sicot appear alongside five younger Boyer children. The same entry records eight cattle and thirty arpents under cultivation.

Ten children are recorded from the Boyer marriage. The first daughter named Marguerite died in infancy; another daughter received the same name twenty years later. Anne-Françoise also died as a baby. Several of their surviving children married into other Montréal families.

Nicolas was buried in May 1714. Marguerite lived for another nineteen years, dying at Montréal on June 20, 1733 and being buried the next day. Her life in the colony had lasted nearly three-quarters of a century.