Louis Hébert

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For the American Civil War officer, see Louis Hébert (colonel).

Louis Hébert (c. 1575 – January 1627) is widely considered to be the first Canadian apothecary as well as the first European to farm in Canada. He was born around 1575 at 129 de la rue Saint-Honoré in Paris to Nicolas Hébert and Jacqueline Pajot. He married Marie Rollet in July 1602 in Paris.

In 1606, he accompanied Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt et de Saint-Just, his cousin in law, to Acadia, a new colony (without any woman, wife neither child before almost 30 years) founded by Pierre Dugua Des Monts in 1604, accompanied by Samuel Champlain. He lived at Port-Royal (now Annapolis, in southern Nova Scotia) from 1606 to 1607 and from 1611 to 1613 when Port-Royal was destroyed by the English deputy governor of Virginia Samuel Argall.

In 1617, with his wife, Marie Rollet, and their three children, Guillaume (3 years old), Guillaumette (9 years old), and Anne (14 years old), he quit Paris for ever to live in Quebec City. He died there 10 years later because of an injury that occurred when he fell on a patch of ice. Statues of Louis Hébert, Marie Rollet, and their children are prominent in Parc Montmorency overlooking the St. Lawrence River in Quebec City.

[edit] Descendants

At the beginning of 1800, Louis Hébert and Marie Rollet had 4592 descendents married in Quebec, according to the PRDH (Historical Demography Research Program) of the Université de Montréal, making the couple the tenth most important one in French-Canadian ancestry at that time. Given the migratory routes of French-Canadians, their descendents thus live mainly in Canada (especially Quebec), but also in communities in New England, upstate New York, and the midwest (especially Michigan, Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota).

Louis Hébert and Marie Rollet had only one son, Guillaume, who married Hélène Desportes. They in turn had a single son, Joseph, who in turn had a single son Joseph who died as a small child thus ending this Hébert line. However, some descendants of Louis Hébert and Marie Rollet may also share the name Hébert through marriage of female descendants with other men named Hébert since there were several other male Hébert immigrants to New France or Acadia with posterity.

See René Jetté, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles du Québec des origines à 1730, Montréal, Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1983, pp. 561-562. See also Robert Prévost, Portraits de familles pionnières, Montréal, Éditions Libre Expression, 1993, Tome 1, pp. 149-154.

[edit] References

George Goulet and Terry Goulet (2007). Louis Hebert and Marie Rollet, Canada's Premier Pioneers. FabJob, Calgary. ISBN 1-897286-15-5. A history of Canada's first permanent colonial settlers.