Zacharie Cloutier and Xainte Dupont

Zacharie Cloutier was a master carpenter from Mortagne, in the Perche, who came to New France in 1634 with his neighbor Jean Guyon to build the new settlement of Beauport. He could not write his name, so he signed with a little picture of an axe. He and his wife, Xainte Dupont, are counted among the ancestors of almost every old Quebec family, and Leo Roy descends from them in four different ways.

Mortagne

Zacharie Cloutier was born about 1590 in the parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Mortagne, the chief town of the Perche. He was the son of Denis Cloutier and his first wife, Renée Brière, who died in 1608, when Zacharie was about 18.

On July 18, 1616, in his home parish, he married Xainte (Sainte) Dupont, the widow of Michel Lermusier. She was born about 1596, the daughter of Paul Michel Dupont and a mother named Perrine. Their six children were all born at Mortagne. Their daughter Xainte died in 1632, at the age of nine; the other five grew up and married.

Robert Giffard's Contract, 1634

Robert Giffard, a surgeon from the Perche, had just been granted the seigneury of Beauport, below Quebec, and in 1634 he came to Mortagne to find skilled men to settle it. On March 14, 1634, Zacharie Cloutier, master carpenter, and Jean Guyon, master mason, signed a contract with him. The two men were to work for Giffard for three years, and each could bring one of his children. Giffard promised:

• to pay their food and keep for the crossing and for the three years after, until 1637;
• to send their wives and children over in 1636 at the families' own expense, and then to maintain them for three years;
• to give Guyon and Cloutier, and their sons Jean Guyon and Zacharie Cloutier, a share of the land cleared by Giffard's men, Giffard keeping half;
• to build each of them a house;
• to give each of them 1,000 arpents of land in the seigneury of Beauport;
• to let them trade with the Indigenous peoples;
• and to give them two cows, if there were more than four.

Zacharie and Jean seem to have sailed that spring with their oldest sons. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says that both families were in the colony by July 27, 1636, when they are named in the marriage contract of Zacharie's daughter Anne.

Beauport

At Beauport the men cleared land and built houses for themselves and for Giffard's other settlers, and a manor house for Giffard himself. Family histories say that they also worked on the parish church and on the fort and governor's residence at Quebec, the Château Saint-Louis.

On February 3, 1637, with their three years nearly done, Zacharie and Jean formally took possession of their own land. Zacharie's fief was called La Clouterie; Jean's, next to it, was Du Buisson. Both appear on this map of the seigneury of Beauport as it was in 1663.

Anne's Marriage Contract, 1636

On July 27, 1636, in Giffard's house, Zacharie and Xainte agreed to the marriage of their daughter Anne, who was ten and a half, to Robert Drouin, a settler from the Perche. It is the oldest marriage contract in Canada that still survives. The contract said that Anne would stay with her parents until she was older. Zacharie could not write, so he made his mark, an axe, the tool of his trade. Beside it is the mark of another carpenter, Martin Grouvel, a witness.

Anne and Robert were married at Quebec on July 12, 1637. They had six children, but four died as babies, and Anne herself died on February 3, 1648, leaving two little daughters. According to family histories, when Robert married again, the Cloutiers raised the two girls themselves.

Their youngest daughter, Louise, also married young. She was thirteen when she married François Marguerie, an interpreter, at Quebec in 1645. He drowned in 1648, and later that year she married Jean Mignot dit Châtillon. Louise is one of Leo Roy's ancestors.

Faith and Homage

Under the seigneurial system, the seigneur divided his land among his settlers and collected rents and dues from them: fees to grind their grain at his mill, a share of the harvest, licenses for hunting, fishing and cutting wood, and days of work. Because Cloutier and Guyon held fiefs, they also owed Giffard “faith and homage”: they were to come to his manor, kneel, and pledge their loyalty.

They did not get along with him. On December 18, 1636, Giffard got a judgment against the two men over work he said they owed him. In 1646 they refused to do him faith and homage. On July 2, 1646, Giffard asked Governor Montmagny for permission to seize their lands, and on July 19 the governor ordered Cloutier and Guyon to comply.

Château-Richer

On July 15, 1652, Governor Jean de Lauson granted Zacharie land at Château-Richer, on the Côte de Beaupré east of Beauport, where several of his children settled. On December 20, 1670, he sold his land at Beauport to Nicolas Dupont de Neuville and moved to Château-Richer himself.

Life on the Côte de Beaupré was not always safe. For years the Iroquois raided the French settlements along the St. Lawrence, and in 1661 Xainte wrote to her family in France:

Xainte Dupont to her family in France, 1661 (translated from the French)

We have been in great fear of the Indians all summer. In the month of June, eight inhabitants of the Côte de Beaupré were massacred by the Iroquois.

Her letter is quoted in Jean Moisan's history of the parish of Château-Richer.

Zacharie died there on September 17, 1677, at about 87, and Xainte died on July 13, 1680, at about 84. Both were buried in the parish cemetery.

Burial of Zacharie Cloutier (translated from the French)

Château-Richer, September 17, 1677. In the year of Our Lord one thousand six hundred seventy-seven, the seventeenth day of September, died Zacharie Cloutier, aged 87 years, after having received the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist and Extreme Unction. He was buried in the cemetery of the church of Notre-Dame de la Visitation on the eighteenth of the same month.

F. Fillion, missionary priest

Burial of Xainte Dupont (translated from the French)

Château-Richer, July 14, 1680. On the fourteenth day of July, one thousand six hundred eighty, Saincte Dupont, widow of the late Zacharie Cloutier, who died the day before at the age of eighty-four, after having received the sacraments of penance, Eucharist and extreme unction, was buried in the cemetery of the parish of Château-Richer by Messire Guillaume Gaultier, then serving as parish priest of this parish.

Charles A. Marin, priest

Remembered

Zacharie Cloutier is the ancestor of all the Cloutiers of Canada, and through his daughters of a great many other families. In Quebec City, a bronze plaque on the monument to Louis Hébert in Parc Montmorency honors “the first settlers of Quebec.” It lists Zacharie Cloutier and Xaintès Dupont, and also Jean Guyon and Mathurine Robin, Robert Drouin and Anne Cloutier, and François Marguerie and Louise Cloutier. A cheese made by a Quebec cheesemaker is even named after him.

Not everything they passed down was welcome. Doctors studying oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy, an inherited weakness of the muscles of the eyelids and throat that is unusually common in Quebec, traced it back to the family of their son Zacharie, who married Madeleine Barbe Aymard at La Rochelle in 1648. A 1974 article in La Presse told the story under the title “By Fault of Zacharie and Xainte.”

Four Lines to Leo Roy

I (Patty Roy) descend from Zacharie Cloutier and Xainte Dupont in four lines, through three of their children, which come down to both of Leo Roy's parents.

Through Louise, to Philomène Dubé, Leo's grandmother:

1. Zacharie Cloutier, about 1590–1677, and Xainte Dupont
2. Louise Cloutier, 1632–1699, and Jean Mignot dit Châtillon
3. Marie Charlotte Mignot, 1674–1747, and Jean Dionne
4. Marie Anne Dionne, 1709–1781, and Jean François Moreau
5. Marie Louise Moreau, 1735–1791, and François Bérubé
6. François Bérubé, 1759–1814, and Marie-Catherine Ouellet
7. Florence Bérubé, 1799–1829, and Antoine Noël Dubé
8. Philomène Dubé, 1828–1909, and Régis Roy

Through Zacharie the younger, to Marie Archange Bouchard, the mother of Régis Roy:

1. Zacharie Cloutier, about 1590–1677, and Xainte Dupont
2. Zacharie Cloutier, 1617–1708, and Madeleine Barbe Aymard
3. Marie Cloutier, born 1659, and Jean Gravel Brindelière
4. Marie-Anne Gravel, 1685–1710, and René Bolduc
5. Marie Anne Bolduc, 1706–1772, and Étienne Rémillard
6. Marie-Josèphe Rémillard, 1736–1775, and Jean-Baptiste Blais
7. Marie Anne Archange Blais, 1770–1830, and Pierre Bernard Bouchard
8. Marie Archange Bouchard, 1793–1836, and Pierre Roy
9. Régis Roy, 1817–1897

Through Jean, to Étienne Beaudoin, the father of Leo's mother, Amanda Beaudoin:

1. Zacharie Cloutier, about 1590–1677, and Xainte Dupont
2. Jean Cloutier, 1620–1690, and Marie Martin
3. Anne Cloutier, 1659–1714, and Paschal Mercier
4. Pierre Mercier, 1687–1746, and Madeleine Asselin
5. Marie Josèphe Mercier, 1726–1778, and Pierre Picard
6. Marie Geneviève Picard, 1757–1835, and Joseph Beaudoin
7. François Beaudoin, born 1785, and Marguerite Labrecque
8. Étienne Beaudoin, 1830–1892, and Henriette Roy

Through Zacharie the younger again, to Henriette Roy, Amanda Beaudoin's mother:

1. Zacharie Cloutier, about 1590–1677, and Xainte Dupont
2. Zacharie Cloutier, 1617–1708, and Madeleine Barbe Aymard
3. Charles Cloutier, 1662–1729, and Anne Thibault
4. Marie Angélique Cloutier, 1692–1749, and Jacques Alaire
5. Marie Angélique Alaire, 1725–1798, and Pierre Laisné (Laliberté)
6. Louis Barthélemi Laisné, 1753–1811, and Madeleine Marcoux
7. Angélique Laliberté, 1782–1844, and Charles Roy
8. Charles Roy, 1803–1855, and Anastasie Goulet
9. Henriette Roy, 1834–1887, and Étienne Beaudoin

Étienne and Henriette were the parents of Amanda Beaudoin, who married Alfred Peter Roy, the son of Régis Roy and Philomène Dubé. Their son was Leo Roy.

The Cloutiers and the Guyons stayed close for generations. Zacharie's son Jean had two children who married grandchildren of Jean Guyon: his son Jean married Louise Bélanger, and his daughter Marie married Jean François Bélanger, both children of Marie Guyon and François Bélanger.