My friend, Suzanne Lesage, successfully located the land of Honoré Lore mentioned in his estate in 1818.
In essence, she has achieved what I believed to be impossible and, in doing so, has brought Honoré back to life through his land. Thank you, thank you, Suzanne!!
I had emailed Suzanne about something else when I received this reply.
Your personal e-mail gives me the opportunity to give you information regarding where the Lord [family] lived. One link is the list of concessions of la Baronnie de Longueuil – Honoré Laure at the bottom of the page – no lot number of course, but we know it is the second concession. The second link is an image of the village of Ste-Marguerite de Blairfindie in 1917 – from the picture I vote for number 114. Why? Second one on the list – no frontage (lot is pie shaped) and half the area of his neighbour.
What path led Suzanne to Honoré?
The Path to Honoré
Suzanne discovered two critical documents at the Quebec Archives, here and the corresponding map, here.
The first document is the land register of the Barony of Longueuil in 1857.
Honoré’s entry is noted as being in the second concession on the south side of La Rivière Montréal.
This map, created much later, shows all of the lots.
Click to enlarge images
On this 1917 map, you can see the River in the center, running left to right. The second concession is located in the bottom center, with the road running left to right, transecting the lots. That’s often how farms were laid out initially for convenience. Roads didn’t try to avoid farms but ran through them. This map is NOT oriented with the north at the top.
Grande Ligne, a landmark, is at left.
Based on the land descriptions, Suzanne pinpointed lot 114, which fortuitously just happens to be just to the right of a distinctive divot in the road.
Can we find it today?
Indeed we can, and here’s the divot.
Indeed, we find the divot and align the map with Grande Ligne, which becomes important to Honoré’s wife’s story for another reason.
Let’s take a virtual drive.
Driving Around
With this divot as our landmark, we can see the triangle-shaped lots that correlate to the hand-drawn map.
I’ve drawn arrows pointing to the borders of the land we believe to be Honoré’s.to the right (east side) of the road. It looks like he owned a few feet on the left side of the road as well.
Honoré bought his land in July of 1789 and must have been overjoyed! After 47 years, he finally had a place called home. He may have eventually owned more than this one parcel.
Corn graces Honoré’s field, now as it did then.
This house stands on his land, but it’s very unlikely that it dates from the late 1700s or early 1800s unless some portion of an older structure is buried underneath. What is likely is that his house stood here.
We know that Honoré had at least one barn on the property along with livestock. His 1818 estate inventory showed that he had 200 sheaves of oats, 1000 sheaves of corn, and 600 bales of hay. That’s a lot!
Today, the address is 461 Chem des Ormes, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, but when Honoré lived here, everyone knew where everyone else lived and who the neighbors were. No one needed addresses.
Many Acadians who settled in L’Acadie in Quebec had been brutally expelled from Acadia, Nova Scotia, in 1755 during Le Grand Derangement, so they were bonded, if not by blood, then by a shared experience. Even half a century later, no one had forgotten any part of that history, nor would they, their children or grandchildren. Many didn’t survive. Honoring their shared heritage was to honor their memories. They wanted to stay together, so they settled with other Acadians.
Honore and his wife, Appoline Garceau, had settled here by 1787, but she died shortly thereafter, and in May of 1788, he remarried to Suzanne Lafaille, the younger sister of his eldest son’s wife.
Those families lived on the same road.
On the Way to Church
Various records show Honoré and his family across the generations attending both Sainte-Marguerite-de-Blairfindie in the L’Acadie/Blairfindie community and St. Luc Catholic Church in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu beginning in 1801. A document detailing the area’s history can be found here.
Honoré and his family would have either walked or climbed into a wagon or maybe a buggy if they were lucky, and traversed the 5 miles or so to church every Sunday and on special occasions such as funerals.
On their way to Ste. Marguerite, they would have passed the Joseph Roy farm, with its stone home and matching barn across the road. Barns were generally larger than their owners’ homes.
Thirsty travelers and their steeds would have been welcome to drink from the well that still exists beside the road. Today, there’s a hand pump.
Ste. Marguerite was closer than St. Luc, so the family attended Ste. Marguerite from 1787 when they arrived until St. Luc was built in 1801. Family members are buried in both cemeteries.
I still wonder what prompted that shift, especially given that Honore Sr.’s adult children and grandchildren were still attending Ste. Marguerite.
You can drive down that same road today, tracing Honoré’s path through the countryside to Ste. Marguerite which was located near the river in L’Acadie. Of course, the roads were dirt paths then, just wide enough for a wagon.
The Bourassa Farm
Down the road a bit, very near if not adjacent Honoré’s land, this quaint old home and barn has a sign outside saying #56 and 1812, which dates this house to that time.
Acadian families were quite large, but their homes were small by today’s standards.
You can read about the Bourassa home, here, along with other landmarks on the Circuit of Heritage Homes, beginning at the Saint-Marguerite-de-Blairfindie church, where the family attended before 1801.
Life in L’Acadie
Honoré’s home probably looked a lot like this one, which is known to have been built prior to 1812. His estate revealed that despite having at least 23 children over a span of 48 years with three wives, there were only two feather beds, a hutch, a chest, and a wardrobe, along with 11 dishes. His wives would have cooked on the “small cast iron stove,” which may have provided additional heat during the cold Quebec winters. He had both a table and an old table, but only four chairs.
Based on the furnishings, Honoré’s house was small, too, but it would have been a mansion for a man born before the Acadians were evicted from Nova Scotia in 1755. He and his family wandered the colonies for two decades he fought in New York in the Revolutionary War. A decade later, the family arrived in Quebec. Any home,no matter how small, would be a Godsend when you’ve had nothing for so long.
In Honoré’s 1818 estate settlement, we find the following information, using Google Translate:
Only an undivided sixth part [marginal addition: in the equally undivided half] of a land of 3 acres of frontage out of 30 acres [arpents] of depth, located in the lordship de la Prairie La Madeleine, holding from the front to the path which leads to St Jean, in depth by representing Pierre Noël Terrien, on one side to the widow François Brosseau and on the other hand to Victor Girouard, and a similar part of the buildings built on it.
Is Francois Brosseau in this document actually Francois Bourassa? It’s possible, but based on these families at WikiTree, I don’t think so. A misspelling is always possible, though, especially since we know the Bourassa family lived in very close proximity.
Honoré Lore began traveling to Saint Luc in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu after that church was built in 1801, but his son, also named Honoré Lore/Lord, continued attending Ste. Marguerite.
My mother’s great-grandfather, Antoine Lore, was born to Honoré Jr. and Marie Lafay/Lafaille and was baptized at Ste. Marguerite, above, in 1805. Antoine would have spent his childhood visiting his grandparents, working and playing in these beautiful fields. He assuredly visited the Bourassa home and knew their children and grandchildren well.
I can’t help but wonder if Honoré Lore Sr.’s son, Honoré Lore Jr., lived on the same land that his father owned. Honore Jr. would have been 50 years old when his father died in 1818. I don’t know if Honore Jr. actually lived here, but I do know he purchased his siblings’ shares of his father’s land.
This location is also confirmed by a secondary indirect source. Honore Jr’s wife, Marie Lafaille, regularly walked to the Protestant Mission at Grande Ligne, reportedly a distance of 2 leagues, or about 6 miles.
If they did not live on the exact same farm as Honore Sr., their home would have been somewhere between Honore’s land and Menard, in the red box above, which would be about 6 miles as described in the Grand Ligne Mission’s documents.
The Bourassa land is just up and across the road. Are Bourassa and Francois Brosseau in Honoré Lore’s estate settlement one and the same individual?
The Bourassa family is shown in the first entries on the following page in the land register, immediately following Honoré’s name.
Notice that Jean-Baptiste Laure is listed, too, so at least some of this land, apparently down the road a bit, is indeed still in the family. Victor Dussault was married to Honoré Sr.’s daughter, Charlotte Marguerite Lore. J. B. Laure is probably Jean-Baptiste Laure, Charlotte’s brother.
Several members of the Lafaille family are recorded, beginning 11 properties further down the list. Both Honoré Lore Jr. and Honoré Sr. married Lafaille daughters, Honoré Sr. as his second wife. This tells us that their father, Francois Lafaille/Lafay, who died in 1824, probably lived on this same road somewhere between the Bourassa home and the church. Based on that property list, the Lafaille home was probably between the Bourassa home and present-day Menard, which grew up at the crossroads.
All of these families would have been in and out of each other’s homes. No one would have knocked, and there were no locks. In many places, especially rural locations, these customs remain to this day.
Within a generation or two, these neighbors up and down the road were all related if they weren’t already when they settled there after more than a century in Acadia and more than two decades in exile.
Finding Honoré’s land and the neighboring Bourassa home allows my mind to drift back more than two hundred years when surrounding trees were being felled for teams of French-speaking men to build cabins and barns as the fields were cleared for planting. Well-manicured orchards replaced old-growth forest.
Honoré’s neighborly arrival would have been heralded by the clip-clop of horses’ hooves and a friendly “Bonjour, Mon Ami” greeting shouted from horseback as he stopped out front to see if his neighbor needed a hand with something.
Honoré’s barn probably looked something like this initially, or maybe he eventually built a stone structure like the Roy barn. It needed to be rather large, sheltering his 18 hens, 9 pairs of turkeys, and 6 young pigs that were the offspring of three old pigs. He was fattening one pig. He also had 8 old sheep and 5 young ones, along with three horses and an old carriage. We don’t know their names, which would have been French, of course, but he had one white horse, one black horse, and one grey horse.
A cow with a broken horn lived in Honoré’s barn, too, along with a red cow with a black nose, a red cow, a brown cow, and one that was red and white. He also had 4 heifers which are cows that have yet to give birth. They probably were the offspring of the other cows.
His two oxen would have been trained to work together as a team and pull the plow in the field.
When Honoré was done helping or visiting with his neighbor, he would have mounted his horse and headed for home, just over the horizon, his house perhaps sheltered behind a few protective trees as a windbreak.
Old trees still stand sentry and line the path along the road in front of the old Acadian homesteads or where they stood.
If you close your eyes, you can still hear Honoré’s galloping horse as he disappears in the distance around the curve in a cloud of dust.
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