Gabriel Berard dit Lepine

Biography

Gabriel Bérard dit Lépine came from Château-du-Loir, in the Sarthe area of western France. He was baptized at Saint-Martin on October 9, 1644. His father, Pierre Bérard, worked as a tailor of women’s clothing; his mother appears under variants of Isabelle Guillermain’s name. Gabriel’s Canadian surname was accompanied by the additional name Lépine, used to distinguish him in the colony’s records.

A marriage contract with Geneviève Hayot was drawn up in October 1673. By 1681 they were living at Dautray, a seigneury on the St. Lawrence’s north bank in the present-day Lanoraie area of Québec, Canada. Their census entry describes a household with daughter Louise and a newborn son, Gabriel, together with four cattle, fifteen arpents under cultivation and a firearm. These details give an agricultural setting to a man identified as a fur trader in the 2019 study Gabriel Bérard dit Lépine: commerçant de fourrure by Madeleine Blanche Lussier and Roland Plante.

The couple’s children were born over a span of roughly thirty years. Parish entries later connect the family with Neuville, farther downstream on the same bank near Québec city, where Jean-François, François and Françoise were born around the turn of the century. The records thus trace a family moving between settlements as well as growing in size.

Gabriel died before Geneviève’s remarriage in December 1712. Published family accounts give conflicting earlier death dates.