The Voyer Family: from Étienne to Bernard, Modern-Day Explorer

Among the 10,000 people who came to settle in New France, a small group of 585 individuals was given no choice in the matter. They were faux sauniers, salt smugglers, who were deported by the King between 1730 and 1744. Since the price of salt was very high in some regions of France and was also subject to a special tax, smuggling was rife. Those convicted of dealing in contraband salt were sentenced to various punishments, including deportation to Canada. This was the fate of Étienne Voyer, native of the bishopric of Angers in the province of Anjou, the son of Étienne Voyer and Renée Bélanger, born sometime between 1705 and 1714. In the summer of 1744, Étienne Voyer and other prisoners were placed aboard a ship, quite possibly the Caribou, at La Rochelle and dispatched to Canada. The conditions on the crossing were hard, and many of the prisoners were hospitalized in the Hôtel-Dieu hospital as soon as they arrived at Quebec City. One of the names that appears in the list of patients at the hospital is Étienne Voyer, hospitalized on July 11, 1744 for a stay of 20 days.

Many of these involuntary immigrants settled in rural areas, worked for established habitants and received land grants, finally marrying and starting families themselves. As the population of New France grew, new land opened up for colonization. On September 23, 1736, the Marquis de Beauharnois, Governor of New France, granted a seigniory extending three leagues on either side of the Chaudière River to Thomas-Louis Taschereau. The first reference to the region of Nouvelle-Beauce was in February 28, 1746, when Taschereau donated a piece of land to the parish so that a church could be built; one of the neighbours mentioned is none other than Voyer. He would farm this property measuring three arpents (an arpent is roughly an acre) wide by 40 arpents deep all his life. He granted part of it to the parish in 1780, and that is where the church stands today. In the census of 1762, Étienne Voyer was farming nine arpents and owned a few animals: a bull, two cows, two calves, three sheep, a horse and a pig. When Thomas-Louis Taschereau died, his widow, Marie-Claire Fleury de la Gorgendière, settled the estate and regularized her tenants' titles to ownership. As it happened, Étienne Voyer had received only an oral promise of land, and he had to wait until January 26, 1764 before receiving title to the land he had owned for close to 20 years.

Texte: Sylvie Tremblay, Certified master geneaologist

Magazine: Cap-aux Diamants No. 56, Winter 1999