The First Family of Canada

Louis Hébert was not on the first ship to settle Canada. But he was close. In 1606 — two years after the first French attempt at permanent settlement and two years before Champlain founded Québec — Hébert joined an expedition to Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia) as apothecary. He was in North America before Québec City existed.

He returned to France, went back to Port Royal from 1611 to 1613, and saw the English destroy it. Then Champlain came to Paris in the winter of 1616–1617, searching for support for his struggling trading post at Québec. He found Louis and made him an offer: bring your family, establish farming, practice medicine. Louis agreed. He sold his pharmacy, his home, everything.

At the port of Honfleur, the fur trading company forced him to sign a new contract. His salary was cut from 600 to 300 livres. He would have to give all his produce to the company. Having already sold everything in Paris, with no way back, Louis signed.

On April 11, 1617, the Hébert family — Louis, Marie Rollet, and their three children Anne (14), Marie-Guillemette (9), and Guillaume (3) — sailed for Québec. The settlement they found had fewer than sixty people.

In the second half of 1620 — the same year the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts — a child was born in the Québec settlement. Her parents were Pierre Desportes, the colony’s warehouse keeper, and Françoise Langlois. The baby was named Hélène, after her godmother: Hélène Boullé, the wife of Samuel de Champlain.

Hélène Desportes is considered the first child of European parents born alive in the St. Lawrence settlement. In the year of her birth, the entire population of Québec was fewer than sixty people.

She is Carl’s direct ancestor — his 11th or 12th great-grandmother. Not a cousin, not a collateral relative, but a direct line: Hélène Desportes → Françoise Hébert → the Fournier line → the Bélanger line → the Goyette line → Rose Lea LaFlamme → to the present.

On October 1, 1634, Hélène Desportes married Guillaume Hébert — Louis Hébert’s son. The first Canadian-born child married the first farmer’s son. Guillaume had inherited half his father’s farm on the heights above the settlement.

They had three children: Joseph (1636), Françoise (1638), and Angélique (1639). Françoise is Carl’s direct ancestor — the link in the chain.

Guillaume died on September 23, 1639, at about twenty-five. Hélène was nineteen with three small children. She moved into a cottage measuring twenty-four by eighteen feet “near the church of Notre-Dame.” She married Noël Morin on January 9, 1640, and had twelve more children.

The founder of Québec held this child at the baptismal font. When Champlain died in 1635, his will left Hélène Desportes 300 livres — a significant sum. She never received the money; Champlain’s estate was contested.

But the connection is documented: the founder of New France was godfather to the first European child born in the settlement, and that child married the son of the first farmer, and their granddaughter’s line runs fourteen generations to the man reading this page.

In 1629, English privateers David, Lewis, and Thomas Kirke captured Québec. Most of the French settlers were put on ships and sent back to France. Marie Rollet and her family stayed. They were the only family to remain in Québec during the three-year English occupation.

When France reclaimed the colony in 1632, Marie was still there — still farming, still raising grandchildren, still the anchor of the settlement. She took in Champlain’s adopted Indigenous daughters Espérance and Charité after his death.

Marie Rollet died on May 27, 1649, in Québec, at the age of about sixty-nine. The priest wrote in the register: “veuve du sieur Hébert depuis longtemps”— “widow of Monsieur Hébert for a long time.” She had been in Québec for thirty-two years.

In her later years, Hélène Desportes became a midwife — the first recorded sage-femme in Canadian parish records. Two of her daughters, a daughter-in-law, and three granddaughters also became midwives. The first Canadian-born child became the founder of a dynasty of birth-workers.

Hélène died around 1675. She had witnessed the entire founding of Canada. Born when the colony had fifty people. Goddaughter of its founder. Wife of the first farmer’s son. Mother of fifteen children. First midwife. She was there for all of it.