Like many of our other Jean ancestors, the Gaudreaus came from the Île de Ré, specifically the parish of Ste-Cathérine (the church is pictured above) in the town of La Flotte. The earliest known ancestor is Maurice Gaudreau or Goterau, who lived in the sixteenth century; he married Catherine Lambreteau and had a son, Jean, who married Marie Prousteau; their son was the father of two brothers who emigrated to Québec. The parents were Jean Gaudreau or Gauttrau (c1618-1682; many spellings) and Marie Rouer or Rouher (married April 1643). The elder, Gilles, was baptized in March 1644, and in March 1665 he signed a contract at La Rochelle agreeing to go to Canada for at least three years. A journey of 54 days on the Chat de Hollande (with 29 others from the Île de Ré) brought him to Québec city in June, and he went to work as a house servant for Jacques Bernier on the Île d’Orléans. In 1675 he was granted three arpents of land on the island. Later he acquired another 120 arpents from Geneviève de Chauvigny. He married Anne Pineau, a 'fille du roi,' in 1672, and in 1680 they were living at Cap St-Ignace, where he died in 1726. There were six cildren, and so far as I can tell, we are not descended from any of them.

Gilles' younger brother Jean Gaudreau, born in 1649, can be found in Québec city by August 1667, and he married in 1679 - her name was Marie-Jeanne Roy (born 1664 in Québec), and according to a website made by a descendant of Gilles, she had been raped at the age of five. (Her father was Nicolas, not of the same Roy family among our Boucher ancestors.) The marriage took place at Nôtre-Dame de Québec in July of that year. They lived near his brother in Cap St-Ignace, but Jean soon died (1685), leaving two sons: Charles (1681) and Jean-Baptiste (1682) and a daughter (Marie-Anne, 1684). His widow soon married Jean Fournier. We are descended from both sons.

Jean-Baptiste seems to have lived his whole life in Cap St-Ignace, where in 1710 he married Geneviève Bernier (daughter of Pierre and Françoise Boulet). She must have died soon after, as he remarried. Their son Augustin Gaudreau was born in March 1713, and in July 1739 he married Elisabeth Guimont, daughter of François and Elisabeth Fortin. Their son Jean-Baptiste Gaudreau in 1769 married Claire Dupont, daughter of Noël and Angélique Morneau; they had a daughter Julie who married François Daignault in 1804. They were great-grandparents of Marie Eva Jean Martin.

Jean-Baptiste's brother Charles Gaudreau (1681-) also married in 1710, two weeks after his brother; his wife was Madeleine Thibault, 22 at the time. Her parents were François-Louis Thibault and Elisabeth-Agnes Lefèbvre. We do not know the birth year of their son Joseph, but in July 1748 at Montmagny he married Ursule Chouinard, daughter of Eustache and Madeleine Bérubé. A son, Joseph, married Marie-Scholastique Proulx in 1769. Joseph and Ursule's daughter Véronique married François Daignault (son of François Daignault and Julie Gaudreau, above) in 1775, and so she was a great-great-grandmother of Marie Eva Jean Martin.

a Gaudreau website from the Société de généalogie de Saint-Eustache