Vanasse

dit Précourt

Here is another of those Québecois families that absolutely everyone seems to be descended from. Paul Vanasse (born about 1617) and his wife Barbe Monsel (born about 1622) lived in the parish of St-Maclou in Rouen in the early seventeenth century (the church they attended, pictured above in an 1829 painting, is perhaps the finest of all examples of the Flamboyant Gothic style). Their son François-Noël was born in Rouen in 1642, and was in Québec by 1665; he bought a small farm near Cap de la Madeleine in January 1669. He married Jeanne Fournier or Fourrier, daughter of Pierre and Jeanne Busou, at Cap de la Madeleine in August 1671. She had already been married (to Jean Baillon) and widowed at 19. Their older children were born in Cap de la Madeleine, the younger in Trois-Rivières (these towns are just across the St Lawrence from each other); but they moved at some point to St-François-du-Lac, where François-Noël died in February 1718. In 1686, he was working as a farm foreman for Joseph Petit, Sieur de Bruno.

Their children: Nicolas (1672-1725, a voyageur who eventually settled at Maskinonge and married Jeanne Bergeron; his descendants were dit Vertefeuille); Marie-Madeleine (1674); Catherine (1676, married Jean Patry in 1693); Jeanne (1678); François (1679, married Marie-Josèphe Le Fettey); Sébastien (1682, dit Bastien); Marguérite (1684); Marie-Anne (1687); Claude (1689-1682); Étienne (1692, married Charlotte DuBois, a granddaughter of Quentin Moral); and Gabrielle (1694). After François-Noël died, his widow married Jean Baillaux; no known children.

Catherine Vanasse was born in August 1676 at Cap de la Madeleine, and in September 1693 at the church of L'Immaculée-Conception in Trois-Rivières, married Jean Patry, who had immigrated from Limoges not long before. She died in St-François-du-Lac in January 1764. Their daughter Marguérite-Madeleine married Joseph Joyal and was the mother of Marie-Anne Joyal, who married our paternal immigrant ancestor Jacques Martin.

The Vanasse family is very widespread in Canada and the United States, and some branches have adopted versions of the "dit" name - there are Bastiens, Précourts, Vertefeuilles, and even Greenleafs in Michigan. Other branches (including one on the White Earth Indian reservation in Minnesota) changed the spelling - Vanase, Vanous, Vanoss, Vadenais, Vadnais, Venasse. See this Vanasse website. There is a Canadian actress named Karine Vanasse; an author of children's books in Alaska, Debra Vanasse; a popular Canadian jazz musician, Jean Vanasse, etc.