Adrien St-Aubin

Biography

Adrien St-Aubin first appears in the Canadian censuses as a young hired servant in Charles Le Moyne’s household at Montréal, on the St. Lawrence River in present-day Québec, Canada. In 1666 he was recorded as eighteen. The household included other contracted workers—a sailor and a gunsmith among them—as well as the Le Moyne children. Adrien remained in Le Moyne’s service in the following census.

He came from Saint-Rémy parish in Dieppe, a port in Normandy in northern France, and was a son of another Adrien St-Aubin and Jacqueline Presar. His approximate birth year, circa 1648, comes from the early census age rather than a recovered baptism.

His connection with Le Moyne continued as he established himself. A history of Longueuil, cited in the genealogical record, places a grant to Adrien on March 12, 1675: two arpents of frontage extending twenty arpents inland, conveyed before the notary Jacques Bourdon. The former servant was acquiring a holding of his own.

On February 19, 1680 he married Jeanne-Marguerite Bloys at Montréal. She was only thirteen; Adrien was approximately thirty-two. Their marriage had been preceded by a contract in August 1679. The 1681 census places them at Longueuil, across the river from Montréal, with one cow and twelve arpents under cultivation.

Their children included Julien, Marguerite, Jeanne, Marie and Charlotte, born during the 1680s and 1690s. Adrien’s exact death date remains unknown. Jeanne-Marguerite married Pierre Émard in February 1702 and had children in that second marriage.