Friday, May 30, 2014

52 Ancestors: #22 Louise Drouin

Amy Johnson Crow at No Story Too Small has issued herself and her readers a challenge for 2014. It’s called “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks”, and as Amy explains, the challenge is to “have one blog post each week devoted to a specific ancestor. It could be a story, a biography, a photograph, an outline of a research problem — anything that focuses on one ancestor”.

For the 22nd week of this challenge, I chose Louise Drouin (1835-1890).

Louise Drouin is my paternal great-great-grandmother and is number 19 in my ancestor list.

She was the fifth of ten children of Pierre Drouin, a day laborer, and his wife Marie Reine Poirier. Louise was the eldest surviving daughter of her parents, her two elder sisters (both named Marie Louise) having predeceased her in 1831 and 1834, respectively.

Louise, sometimes known as Eloise, was baptized on 16 August 1836 in St-Benoît (now Mirabel, a little to the north of Montreal) in Deux-Montagnes County, Quebec. According to her baptism record, she was born in July 1835. It’s possible that she was born in Cornwall, Ontario, where her father Pierre resided and worked at the time of her baptism.

I haven’t been able to trace where her parents and siblings lived in the 1840s, but the family lived somewhere in the southwestern part of the province of Quebec. By the 1851 census, the Drouin family, including 17-year-old “Leuesia”, is enumerated in Ste-Cécile-de-Masham in Gatineau County.

It was here in Masham that Louise met and married her fourth cousin Ménésippe Meunier, who I wrote about last week for 52 Ancestors; see his story here. The couple, who wed on 4 October 1853, had eleven children between 1855 and 1874, including my great-grandmother Angélina Meunier (1855-1896), whose story I wrote last February for 52 Ancestors.

After Ménésippe’s death in January 1883, Louise married widower Joseph Poliquin on 14 September 1884 in Masham. Louise and Joseph, a voyageur and later a day laborer, didn’t have children.

Louise died on 13 March 1890 in Masham; she was 53 years old, according to her burial record. Two days later, her funeral took place in the parish cemetery, with her younger son Gédéon Meunier in attendance.

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.

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