Guimont

also Guimond

Like so many others, this family is from the Perche district - in this case the hamlet of Des Champs, near Tourouvre. Louis Guimont or Guimond (1625?-1661, son of François Guimond and Jeanne Delaunay) was recruited by Jean Juchereau in the winter of 1646-47, and signed an indenture on February 16, 1647 with his friend Jean Malenfant. They were to work for Juchereau for six years, and would be paid 40 livres Tournois per year and given a suit and a pair of shoes. They sailed a few months later, either on the Le Bon or the St-François-Xavier (both belonging to Juchereau, out of Dieppe) and arrived at Québec city on August 6. Louis married Jeanne (daughter of Antoine Bitouset and Nicole Dupont) at the chapel of St-Jean outside Québec city on February 11, 1653 (this would have been almost exactly at the time his indenture expired). After Louis was killed in 1661, Jeanne married Jean Baret, who outlived her by a year.

They had four children: Jacques (born September, died October 1653); Joseph (1654-1731, married Anne Paré); Louise (1658, married Eustache Baton); and Claude (1660, married Anne Roy or Leroy, see below).

Louis Guimond settled first in the parish of Ste-Anne de Beaupré, and in 1657 was helping to build the first church there (engraving above; called the Sailors' Chapel; the dedication to Saint Anne came later) when his back was seriously injured. Apparently without the usual prayers to Saint Anne, he was miraculously cured - this is the first cure attributed to what became Québec's most visited shrine. The present basilica (which has one of the saint's finger bones) is filled with crutches, wheelchairs and the like left by people who were cured there. The altar has a painted panel showing Guimont on crutches. I suppose we have to thank Saint Anne for our existence, as our ancestor Claude was born several years after this incident. Another version has him suffering from kidney failure rather than an injury, and the Jesuit Relations has the cure happening as he placed stones for the foundation. But the saint apparently abandoned him later; in the summer of 1661, he was captured by a raiding band of Iroquois and killed near lake Champlain on June 18. A record of this event in the archives of the Québec Seminary says, "On the 18th, at 8 in the morning, the massacre or capture started of several people at Beaupré and the Isle of Orleans by the Iroquois who came down from Tadoussac after the coup they did there; they spoke that day of 8 o'clock at Beaupré and 7 o'clock at Isle of Orleans, which turned out to be true." A priest, Georges Belanger, added: "The summer of 1661 started in fear and ended in tears and blood. A war cry, the yell of the Iroquois, woke the echoes of Beaupré and spread panic. It was June 18, at 8 in the morning. After having kidnapped or massacred seven persons on the Isle of Orleans, these sworn enemies of the French threw themselves like a herd of wild animals on the coast of Beaupré, where they surprised the defenseless farmers. Among them was Louis Guimont, the same man who was miraculously healed at the foundation of the Chapel of the Sailors." The usual inventory of a dead person's belongings took place on July 14, so Louis' family knew by then that he was dead.

Claude Guimont was almost certainly born in 1660, and died at Cap-St-Ignace on February 11, 1738. He married Anne Roy, a "fille du roi" from St-Hilaire-sous-Romilly near Sens (1665?-1719, daughter of Pierre Le Roy and Anne Fleury) on October 8, 1685. She was the widow of Nicolas Bouchard, with whom she had six children: Angélique (1673-1722, married Louis Bossé, 10 children); Agnès (1675-1758, married Joseph Morin, 9 children); Élisabeth-Agnès (1677-1739, married Charles Fournier, 13 children); Pierre (1679-, married Catherine Fournier, 5 children); Ignace (1682-1733, married Jeanne Leroy, not a relative of his mother); and Nicolas (1684-1746, married Anne Veau dit Sylvain, 11 children). With Claude Guimont, Anne Roy had six further children, all born at Cap-St-Ignace: Marie-Anne (1686-1705, married Jean-François Thibault; she died less than a year after the wedding and had no children); Louis (1688-1716, married Marie-Françoise Richard, 2 children - their son Louis was an ancestor of Jack Kerouac); Joseph-François (see below); Louise (1693-1762, married Charles Fortin, brother of Joseph-François' wife, 15 children); Claude-Joseph (1695-1712); and Jean-Baptiste (born and died October 1697).

Joseph-François Guimont was born October 28, 1690 and married Élisabeth Fortin at L'Islet on February 5, 1715. (She died at Cap-St-Ignace on May 7, 1733, and was the daughter of Charles Fortin and Sainte Cloutier, from whom we are descended through several other lines as well.) They had twelve children: Claude-Joseph (1715, married Salomé Morneau, sister of our ancestor Marie-Angélique Morneau Dupont, 9 children); Pascal (1716-1721); Charles (1718); Jean-Baptiste (1720-1731); Élisabeth-Félicité (see below); Marie-Louise (1724-, married Pierre Bernier; we are descended from two of his sisters; see Bernier); Ursule (1726, married Joseph Buteau and then Charles-François Chrétien); Marguérite-Françoise (born and died March 1728); Marie-Josèphe (1729-1731); François (born and died November 1730); Marie-Jeanne (1732, married Julien-Jean Bourgault, 6 children); and Louis-Jean-Baptiste (May-August 1733).

Élisabeth-Félicité Guimont (October 24, 1721-1761) married Augustin Gaudreau on July 13, 1739 at Cap-St-Ignace. Their daughter Julie Gaudreau was maternal grandmother of Louis Jean, Marie Eva Jean's father.