Catherine Forestier was born in 1637 at La Rochelle in the old province of Aunis, a port city whose departures fed the population of New France throughout the seventeenth century. She was the daughter of Jean Forestier and Julienne Coifée. Her mother died there on 20 April 1650, a loss that occurred while Catherine was still in her early teens.¹
By 19 November 1657 she was in the colony, where she married Jacques Ménard dit Lafontaine at Trois-Rivières.² The timing of the marriage and the origin at La Rochelle place her among the early marriageable women who came before the King’s Daughters program, part of the movement of young women whose arrival helped stabilize family life in the small river settlements.³ Jacques Ménard was already established in the colony, and their marriage is recorded in the parish register that documents the earliest generation of families in that region.²
The first years of their married life were spent at Trois-Rivières, where their earliest children were born. The parish registers record the burial of their daughter Marguerite, born in 1658 and deceased before 1666.⁴ By 1671 the family had moved to Boucherville, part of the seigneurial expansion along the south shore of the St. Lawrence. There Catherine gave birth to the younger children who would grow up in that seigneurial community.⁴
The baptisms at Trois-Rivières and Boucherville trace the growth of the household over nearly two decades:
Marie (1659), Jean-Baptiste (1660), Louis (1662), Maurice (1664), Jean (1666), Marguerite (1668), Jeanne-Françoise (1669), Anne (1671), Catherine (27 September 1673), Marie-Madeleine (1675, buried the same month), Thérèse (1676), and Jacques (1678).⁴
These entries show the familiar rhythm of seventeenth-century colonial life — repeated pregnancies, the loss of small children, and the gradual establishment of a large family that would remain in the Boucherville area.
René Jetté’s reconstruction of the family and the parish records confirm that Catherine spent the rest of her life in that community.⁴ The genealogical notice preserved by Gagné identifies her La Rochelle origin and situates her among the women whose arrival in the 1650s contributed to the permanent settlement of the colony.³
Catherine died at Boucherville on 31 March 1694 and was buried there the same day.⁵ Her husband survived her by more than a decade, dying in 1707.⁴
Her life follows the arc seen in so many of the earliest immigrant women of Canada: departure from a French Atlantic port, marriage soon after arrival, years marked by the cycle of baptisms and burials in the parish register, and permanence in a seigneurial river community that was still new when she first saw it.
Sources
- Parish registers of La Rochelle (Aunis), burial of Julienne Coifée, 20 April 1650.
- Trois-Rivières parish register, marriage of Jacques Ménard dit Lafontaine and Catherine Forestier, 19 November 1657.
- Peter J. Gagné, Before the King’s Daughters: The Filles à marier, 1634–1662 (Pawtucket, Rhode Island: Quintin Publications, 2002), entry for Catherine Forestier.
- René Jetté, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec des origines à 1730 (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1983), 823–824; Cyprien Tanguay, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes (Montréal, 1871–1890), sub Ménard; PRDH, family file of Jacques Ménard and Catherine Forestier; parish registers of Trois-Rivières and Boucherville (Drouin Collection), baptisms and burials of the Ménard children, 1658–1678.
- Boucherville parish register, burial of Catherine Forestier, 31 March 1694.