Anne (Jim's 6 X great-grandmother) was born about 1681 in Cocheco (now Dover, New Hampshire USA). This was during a tumultuous period in New England and Quebec history; there were numerous Indian raids on the New England settlers usually in retaliation for grievances of the French against the English. Several Indian tribes were allied with the French at this time. Villages were burned, many people were killed or kidnapped, and 10-year-old Anne was one of those captured in a raid and taken to Quebec on January 25, 1692. While some of the kidnapped children remained captives (in Indian encampments), Anne was adopted----likely informally----by a Montreal family, and baptized as a young teenager. How traumatic it must have been for her to have experienced this; it is unlikely that she would ever have had contact with her parents and siblings again. At the age of twenty-four, she married Sebastien Cholet dit Laviolette who had come to Quebec as a soldier. His occupation in later years was that of a weaver. They were parents of eleven children, although seven of these died in infancy or early childhood.
Some of the New England captives returned to the United States in later years, but many had married and settled in Quebec so they stayed. In 1702, the King awarded compensation to the captives who remained. Anne received 30 livres (pounds). [This was a significant amount; the 2020 equivalent in Canadian dollars is about $9,000.]
Fifty-one-year-old Sebastian died in early 1728, as did their seven-year-old daughter Marie-Josephe, and a one-year-old grandson----possibly there was an epidemic of some kind. Anne, whose youngest child was only five at that time, remarried two years later to a recent widower (Claude Sansart dit LePetitpicard) who was twenty years her senior. Anne died at the age of seventy; it is interesting that her death record still referred to her as "anglaise" [English].
Anne's great-grandfather Rev. Joseph Hull [Jim's 9 X great-grandfather] was a minister who brought a group of twenty-one families to Massachusetts from England in 1635. "Hull's Colony" was established south of Boston, and later became present-day Weymouth.
Comments