Honoré Danis and Perrine LaPierre.

Perrine.

Our ancestor Perrine LaPierre's parents had passed away by the time she made the decision to travel to Québec. She was born around 1642 to Pierre LaPierre and Claude Leclerc and baptized in the parish of Saint-Léonard in the village of Corbeil to the south of Paris in Île de France.

King Louis XIV began sponsoring young women in 1663 to travel to the colony. Like Perrine, many of the first recruits were from in and around Paris. In later years the Canadian men expressed a preference for hardier young women accustomed to farm life, but Perrine was to show her mettle.

Perrine boarded Le Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Dieppe along with about 90 other women and a couple dozen tradesmen. Her shipmates included our ancestors Marie Debure and Jeanne Servignan. The vessel arrived in Québec on 18 June 1665.

The ships would stop in first in Québec, then proceed to Trois-Riviérès, so it was some time before she made her way into Montréal where she met Honoré Danis, a widower with two young sons. Married in Notre Dame de Montréal on 20 March 1666, the couple had eleven children over the course of their 24 year marriage. They lost two at very young ages, Charlotte and Jacques, maintaining the sad average of the period where 1 in 5 infants died. Our ancestor René was born 21 December 1679.

Family.

When the 1667 census was taken in Montréal Honoré, 40, and Perrine, 24 reported two children (these are the two sons he had with his first wife Marie). He was a carpenter and bore no arms. The couple had 16 arpens of land cultivated and three bestes à cornes.

By the 1681 census of the Île de Montréal Honoré was 53, a carpenter, and had no arms. The family had four bestes à cornes, 30 arpens terres en valeur. Perrine LaPierre, was 35 and the following children were at home: Jean, 14; Honoré, 13; Catherine, 10; Pétronille, 9; Jeanne, 8; Paul, 6; Nicolas, 4. The census does not mention our ancestor René, age 2.

His numerous business dealings are well represented in the records of notaries. In time, his sons Jean and Honoré followed in their father's trade. Nicolas became a master cabinet maker and Paul-Pierre a stone mason. Charles moved into the fur trade, traveling west to Kaskaskia where he married an Amérindienne woman, Dorothée Méchipouéoua.

Tuée par un sauvage ivre qui voulait la violer.

The Jesuit Bishop François de Laval tried, with little success, to quash the liquor trade with Indians believing their drunkenness to be both harmful and immoral. Indeed in 1661 colonists were whipped or even executed for selling them brandy. The ban was lifted October 1668 when Intendant Jean Talon reversed the prohibition, though he did forbid the Indians from becoming inebriated. The practice had a devastating effect on the Danis family. On 12 July 1689 Honoré and Perrine's daughter Jeanne was "killed by a drunk savage who wanted to violate her". She was 16. They buried their child on 12 July 1689.

Honoré died less than a year later, at the age of 65. René was about 11 and his youngest sibling was about 6 at the time.

Remarriage.

At 63, Perrine married the cooper Yves Lucas dit Saint-Venant on 19 March 1705 in Lachine. Perrine's sons Nicolas and René wed that same year. She died at age 70 in the hospital Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal on 24 April 1712.