Sometimes you get an answer to the question of when and why your family members came to the “New World” — even if it’s the distant past, and a colorful, perhaps sobering, reason.  In an age of information and scientific discoveries, it’s not always easy to find the most personal, family history. On my father’s side, I know nothing past my great-grandparents, and still don’t know why they came from Ireland, or when.  In the quests for knowledge, self-knowledge is sometimes the hardest to gain - all those influences of parent to child over the generations who make us what we are– their successes and heartbreaks, all the events of history, great or small, that influenced their lives like the assassination of JFK, landing on the moon, 9/11, have influenced ours.

Marie Riton is my great-grandmother, 13 generations past, a direct line of childbearing from her womb to mine.  Those French-Canadians were good record keepers, and the births and marriages are well documented from the time she arrived in 1650, to my own birth in 1958.  She was born in Poitrou, France about 1627. On 6 Nov 1644, she had an “enfant natural”, a daughter named Marie, whose father was Abraham Brunet from La Rochelle; this is known. On 29 June 1645, Marie Riton became a Calvinist – a Protestant.  Then, at the age of 23, she left France, without family but perhaps with a small daughter to become a “Fille a Marier” – a marriageable girl for one of the bachelors in New France. According to Peter Gagne’s book, Before the King’s Daughters: The Filles a Marier, “there is no mention of her daughter in the Canadian archives, who presumably died some time before her departure or during the crossing.”  In New France, Marie married Leonard LeBlanc, a mason, and went on to have seven more children, before she died around age of 50.  Of note, she did become confirmed as a Catholic in Quebec in 1660. 

There you have it: a girl gone bad, pregnant out of wed-lock at 17 from a man who for whatever reason did not marry her.  Out of rebellion or religious fervor, she goes Protestant in a very tumultuous time and place, until later on as a respectable married matron, she reconverts to Catholicism.  As a Fille A Marier, she is married to a man she does not know and goes on to raise a large family with him. She is, without question, a pioneer — only single and female without financial or family support. She goes as part of a deal to make a new life – because the old life wasn’t working out so well. This is what she goes to: “the filles à marier came alone or in small groups. They were not recruited by the state and did not receive a dowry from the King. They were promised nothing but the possibility of a better life. If they survived the perils of the crossing, they lived with the daily threat of death at the hands of the Iroquois. If they survived the Iroquois, they had to deal with the hard life of subsistence farming, harsh winters spent in a log cabin that they may have helped build, epidemics of smallpox and "fever" and difficult and often dangerous childbirth.”

How exciting! How risky! How difficult! How different from safe, suburban, work hard, get ahead, be comfortable, lives of my own generation.  It makes a difference, I’m not sure how, to know that mother-to-daughter, we are directly related.  There is always an answer to the question “Why did they come?” And sometimes, almost 400 years later, you can discover it.