New Englander that I am, married to a man whose ancestors seem to be exclusively Franco-American — French-Canadians from Quebec and Acadians from what is now Nova Scotia — I wouldn’t normally be drawn to a book with “Mississippi” in the title.
But of course, it turns out I’m quite drawn to Giulia L. Saucier’s book, “A Mississippi First Family: The Sauciers from 1603 to 1865.”
The first question of someone starting Franco genealogy might be whether the Sauciers were Acadian — part of the 1755 deportation by the British of thousands of French-descent people from what is now Nova Scotia to Louisiana and other Gulf areas, and even along the Atlantic coast. Other Acadians, we know, were displaced multiple times until they arrived in 1785 in the Madawaska area at what is now the top of Maine.
The answer is an easy “no.” The Sauciers were not Acadian; their immigrant ancestor Louis Charles Saucier arriving in Quebec in about 1665.
In fact, the Saucier family tree clearly branched in 1699 when son Jean-Baptiste Saucier went to Mississippi with the second settlement of d’Iberville, while son Charles stayed in Quebec.
The Saucier roots, we know, are in St. Eustache, Paris, where Louis Charles was born about 1634 to Charles Saucier and his wife, Charlotte Clairet. Charles was organist and musician in the court of King Louis XIV at St. Eustache, a position which was more respected than some, but not necessarily well-paying.
My husband finds it interesting that a musician such as Charles also would have been the mechanic for the organ he played. Gaelen was a master electrician for many years, his dad specialized in repairing small motors and other items, and our sons also have a talent for electrical and construction arts.
Louis Charles was about 31 when he left Rochefort by boat in 1665, and he was described in Quebec as a civil servant “in service of the King.”
The population of early Quebec City was heavily male, but Louis Charles’ arrival coincided with the king’s Filles du Roi program — the “daughters of the king” — which sent young women to New France to help populate the territory.
The young women were not all educated and cultured, as we may have thought — the first group of 100 contained many orphaned girls from poor houses and even some women still married. But the birth rate was doing well by 1671 and 1672 — years when Louis XIV both paid a pension for babies born and gave tax-exempt status to large families, Saucier writes.
The king had ordered families to cluster together, but the unsanitary, diseased conditions of 17th-century urban Paris no doubt helped inspire French settlers to lay out properties that were narrow but long, giving each owner access to the St. Lawrence River as well as acreage.
Maine cartographic maps of the 1880s, maps giving the names of properties in each town, showed the same layout of narrow parcels of land bordering the St. John River.
Louis Charles first lived with the family of widower Etienne Dumets in Sillery north of the city, according to the 1666 Census. He later lived in the military garrison until his 1671 marriage to widow Marguerite Gaillard-Duplessis, a Fille du Roi then perhaps 24 years old, with two children.
For more information on the Filles du Roi and some of the soldiers they married, visit La Societie des Filles du Roi et Soldats du Carignan at www.fillesduroi.org. The society does offer membership in its group.
Louis Charles and Marguerite’s older son, the one who stayed in Quebec and was married three times, was Charles Saucier, born in 1672. His wives were Marie Anne Bisson, Marie-Madeleine St. Denis and Marie-Francois Lebel.
There were children from all three marriages, including my husband’s ancestor Charles Saucier, who married Rosalie Bouchard in 1722 at St. Anne de la Pocatiere and produced a family of more than 10 children. Charles and Rosalie were the parents of Henri Saucier, who married Charlotte Meunier-Lagace and whose son Germain Saucier married Sophie Bellefleur-Gattee in 1824 at St. Basile, the first Catholic parish in the Madawaska area.
The southern branch of the Saucier family, however, began its destiny when Louis Charles’ second son, Jean Baptiste, born in 1674, left Quebec in 1699 to join the second expedition of two of the king’s explorers — Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville; and his brother, Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville.
Jean Baptiste in 1704 married Gabrielle Savary, who had arrived that year aboard the Pelican from France, one of 23 girls and women sent to marry the Canadians as requested by Iberville. The couple occupied a large lot near Rue de Bienville, not far from Fort Louis.
Gabrielle married twice more after Jean Baptiste died in 1716 but was still called Widow Saucier. Descendants of sons Henri and Jean Baptiste, Saucier writes, include Gulf Coast Mississippi families Nicaise, Ladner, Moran, Dedeau, Cuevas, Frierson and Favres. She quotes the Founders of the Old Mobile Society as saying this Saucier family and that of Jean Baptiste Beaudreau de Graveline are probably the most prolific in the area.
Gabrielle, a midwife and later a merchant, relocated her family to New Orleans and at one point asked for free passage to what would become Haiti, but ended up staying here. The family did have slaves and moved to a farm below New Orleans. When she died in 1735, her four sons assumed her debts.
Henri married Quebec native Barbe Lacroix, and Jean Baptiste married Rose Marie Girardy. Their youngest brother, Francois, was something special — a cantor at church and gifted draftsman who was a particular example of Gabrielle’s efforts to get assistance for her children’s schooling. Surveying Bienville’s western lands showed his talent for mapping, and he was later responsible for the design of Fort Chartres in Illinois.
Francois Saucier came to my attention when I found a chapter on his achievements, “Francois Saucier, Engineer of Fort deChartres, Illinois,” by Walter J. Saucier and in the McDermott compilation “Frenchmen and French Ways in the Mississippi Valley.” This book is available at the University of Maine’s Fogler Library in Orono and at the University of Southern Maine.
There is a tremendous amount of history in this 203-page book and a wonderful bibliography that will help me seek out other resources on Saucier and Franco genealogy.
“A Mississippi First Family: The Sauciers from 1603 to 1865” is published by outskirts press for $13.95, a price that will allow me to purchase more copies of it for my family. Visit www.outskirtspress.com or see Amazon.
World War I letters
Estella “Tootie” Bennett will share letters by her great-uncle, Elmer Lindie of Monson, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 7, in the final meeting of the year of the Dover-Foxcroft Historical Society at the Gerrish-Warren Meeting Room at Thayer Parkway, Park Street, Dover-Foxcroft. Lindie served in the Yankee Division, Company F, 103rd Infantry Regt., at the Mexican border and in World War I.
For i nformation on researching family history in Maine, see Genealogy Resources under Family Ties at bangordailynews.com/browse/family-ties. Send genealogy queries to Family Ties, Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor 04402, or email familyti@bangordailynews.com.