Their Marriage.

Dowry From the King.

Georgette Richer's belongings were worth about 300 livres in addition to the 50 livres she received from the King for her dowry. She and François Dupuis signed a marriage contract on 14 September 1670 before the notary Pierre Duquet. Georgette Richer and François Dupuis were married in Notre-Dame de Québec on 6 October 1670, just two months after her arrival.

Family Life.

Their first two children, René and our ancestor Moïse, were baptized there in 1671 and 1673 respectively. In all the couple had seven children, though only three lived to raise families. Two of their girls, Angélique and Marguerite, died a few days apart in October 1684.

Georgette's day included washing her family's clothes in a large iron kettle hung over an open fire. For soap, the ash from burned hardwoods was boiled in water to produce a layer of lye on top. Combining the lye with rendered animal fat resulted in a soft lathery soap.

The kitchen garden she tended yielded vegetables like peas that, along with whatever berries she collected, were preserved to store for eating over the cold winter months. Meals included hearty stews that could simmer throughout the day while the family worked.

In 1675 the family was living in the Seigneurie de Maur close to the farms of Georgette's fellow traveler Anne Lagou and her husband Pierre Vallière and of the carpenter Remy Dupille. The census of 1681 reveals that François, 44 and Georgette, 34 had 4 children: René 10, Moïse 8, Angélique 4 and Marie-Anne-Françoise, age 2. No trade, livestock, guns or cultivated land was reported.

A Farmer.

The couple walked or perhaps hired a barge to take them west along the Saint-Lawrence River to LaPrairie where Marguerite was born February 1682. François and his family moved onto a 100 acre farm on 24 December 1684 in Saint-Jean along the Saint-Jacques River. The river meanders through the grasslands in LaPrairie on its northward journey to the Saint-Lawrence. On 4 September 1693 the property was transferred to him in a contract prepared by notaire Claude Mague of Montréal. This was a sizable farm, most of the habitants farmed plots of just a few acres.

François and Georgette's daughter Marie-Anne-Françoise married the baker Pierre Brion in LaPrairie on 6 November 1695. Their sons René and Moïse chose a more adventurous path hoping to make their fortune in the lucrative fur trade. What they would soon learn, however, was that in the tightly controlled industry it was primarily the men at the top, the license (or congé) holders, who made the money. The intent of the license was two-fold: too many men off in the woods left the colony vulnerable to attack and emptied the fields of workers, secondly, the quantity of furs coming in could be controlled to keep the prices stable and the profits high. But to many young men in the frontier the restriction on trapping seemed like an unreasonable barrier to earning a living.