Perrine Meunier

Biography

Perrine Meunier’s migration divided her family between Brittany in western France and New France, France’s North American colony. She and Julien Daubigeon came to Montréal, on the St. Lawrence River in present-day Québec, Canada, with the Grande Recrue of 1653, while their daughter Jeanne remained in France. Another daughter, Catherine, was baptized at Montréal that November, with Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance as godparents.

Julien died in 1655. Their daughter Claire was born after his death and lived only a few weeks. Perrine remarried in 1658, choosing François Roinay, another man associated with the recruitment of 1653. Their daughters Marie-Barbe and Jeanne joined a household that already included Catherine from Perrine’s first marriage.

The daughter left in Brittany did not disappear entirely from the family record. Historian Marie Gagné located a receipt made at Clisson in 1677 and subsequently preserved among the papers of the notary Antoine Adhémar. It identifies Jeanne Daubigeon as a daughter of the deceased Julien and Perrine Meunier and records one hundred livres received for her share of her father’s estate. More than twenty years after the migration, an inheritance still connected the two sides of the Atlantic.

In Canada, Catherine married Pierre Gagné at La Prairie, across the river from Montréal, in 1670; their marriage was the first entered in the parish register. Perrine’s later life was associated with that community, where she died in March 1694. Her family’s history contains both the rebuilding of a household after widowhood and a separation that remained visible in legal records decades afterward.