#52Ancestors – The King’s Daughters Marguerite Cardillion #1

I am taking up the challenge leveled by Amy Johnson at No Story Too Small.  The challenge is to write one blog post each week on one of your ancestors for 2014.  The challenge is a tool to write consistently, which is what I don’t do.  I write one long blog a week and should write a few times a week.

I chose my 8th great grandmother, Marguerite Cardillion.  Marguerite was born in St-Gervais, Paris, Ile de France, France in 1651 (some records show 1641).  In 1665 she left France for the Canada sponsored by the French Government as a Les Filles de Roi (King’s Daughters).  France was desperately trying to increase population of New France in the 1660’s to preserve their threshold in the New World.

The were many men in Quebec and very few women.  Women were wanted to marry and bring forth many children to the new colony.  The Crown offered a King’s dowry to women who willing went to the new world.  Girls or young women who were either orphaned or without means to offer a dowry for a suitable marriage were eschewed in 1600’s France.   Either condemned to women’s pauper prisons, convents, or worse yet the streets, some felt their only escape was a chance in an unknown new world.  About 800 women took up the endeavor and traveled across the Atlantic to Quebec to become wives of soldiers and settlers.

King's Daughters

King’s Daughters

The crossing took two months in the hold of a stinking ship.  To survive that voyage, a person needed to be of hardy stock.  Though the men wanted good looking women, they needed stocky women who could work a new farm and bear many, many children.   Marguerite most likely married within six months of arriving.  The women/girls did have time to get to know the men that were courting them before entering a contract of marriage.   There was very little hanky-panky back then.  Everything was kept prim and proper by the Church, nuns and society itself.

I chose Marguerite for this post because she took a chance leaving France where she faced hardship as an orphan with no way of supporting herself.  Going to a strange land where she might not even survive the crossing, willing to contract a marriage to a man she barely knew and knowing there was no return to France if she changed her mind.

She fulfilled the Crown’s goal of populating the French Colony. That 15 year old girl is the 8th great grandmother to hundreds of descendents in Canada and the United States.   n the U.S.

Photo credit: http://www.migrations.fr/700fillesroy.htm

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