Martin

dit Montpellier

I have seen a few amateur-genealogy websites that connect this family with that of Abraham Martin dit l'Écossais, making him a brother of Antoine (below), but there is no convincing evidence at all for this. The parents of Abraham are unknown, and the only circumstantial evidence of him in Scotland points to Metz as his birthplace (and that's about as far as one can get from Montpellier in France). In any case the dates don't match (Antoine was perhaps 40 years younger than Abraham).

Jean Martin married Isabelle Côté at the church of St-Xiste in (?) Montpellier (in the far south of France, near the mouth of the Rhône) sometime before 1625. The parish no longer exists, unless it is the St-Xiste in Camplong, a village near Béziers, some thirty miles southwest of Montpellier but in the same diocese. Many genealogists assume this to be the case, though if true, it doesn't explain the "dit Montpellier" name. Very few Québecois families came from so far south, and it seems certain that this couple was not related to the other Martin and Côté families in our family tree. Some descendants used "Montpellier" as their surname, and - curiously - the family in seventeenth-century Québec was sometimes "dit Montpellier" and sometimes "dit Beaulieu" - though they cannot have been connected with the Martins "dit Beaulieu" of Nemours, my direct paternal ancestors. Other families did use "Beaulieu," though.

Their son Antoine, the immigrant ancestor, was born in Montpellier (or maybe Camplong) about 1625 and evidently trained as a shoemaker, as he worked at that trade later in Québec city. But he came to Canada originally as a soldier, probably in 1646. He married Denise Sevestre on June 18 of that year (she was 14); they lived on the Grande-Allée in the capital, where he worked as a shoemaker until his early death on May 11, 1659 (probably aged about 34). There were two children: Antoine (married Jeanne Cadieux, 3 children, and Marie Bonnet, 4 children: note that two of the younger Antoine's children, one from each marriage, married into the Turcotte family but are not our direct ancestors); and Marie-Thérèse (born November 28, 1656 and baptized two days later at Nôtre-Dame de Québec). She married Mathurin Langevin on October 9, 1674 at the same church. See Langevin for descendants.

The painting above shows the Grande-Allée in the nineteenth century. In Antoine's time it was outside the city walls and exposed to attack; poor people lived there; today it is a very high-rent neighborhood with mansions and luxury hotels.