Jeanne Le Moyne

Biography

Jeanne Le Moyne’s household in Montréal, on the St. Lawrence River in present-day Québec, Canada, was a busy commercial establishment as well as a family home. In 1666 the census listed her with Jacques Le Ber, their three children, Jacques’s sister Marie, and a group of workers that included a sailor, baker and cooper. The entry makes visible some of the labour behind a prosperous merchant family.

Jeanne had married Jacques at Montréal on January 7, 1658. Her brother Charles Le Moyne soon became Jacques’s business partner, linking the household to one of the town’s expanding trading concerns.

By the 1681 census, the family had five children at home and a much larger listed workforce. The same return counted thirty cattle, forty sheep and 150 cultivated arpents.

Her daughter, also named Jeanne, chose a markedly different life from that of the merchant household. She withdrew into religious seclusion while still living in her parents’ home. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography recounts that she did not leave that seclusion to attend her mother during her final illness in November 1682.

Jeanne Le Moyne died on November 8, 1682.