The Rebellion, the Twins, and the Road to Vermont: The Life of Josephte Bourgeois
Some ancestors leave behind a diary. Josephte Bourgeois left behind something rarer: a paper trail scattered across two countries, four states, and 150 years — baptismal records in French, a marriage certificate in Rhode Island, a death certificate in Vermont, and a scrawled priest's burial note translated from 1849 that still, somehow, has the power to break your heart. Piece it all together, and what emerges is the story of a woman who married at sixteen, buried four children before she turned 27, uprooted her family across an international border, and died at 47 — leaving behind a family that would go on to build lives across Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island for generations.
Born in the Shadow of a Rebellion
Josephte Bourgeois was born on September 12, 1824, in the parish of Saint-Denis-sur-Richelieu, in what was then called Lower Canada — French-speaking, Catholic, and still very much under British colonial rule. Her parents, Joseph Bourgeois and Marie Desanges Gauvin, gave her a name and a birthplace that turned out to sit right in the middle of one of the most important events in French-Canadian history.
In November 1837, when Josephte was thirteen, the town of Saint-Charles-sur-Richelieu — practically next door to where she'd later marry — became a flashpoint of the Lower Canada Rebellion, an uprising by French Canadians against British colonial rule and the political and economic system that favored English-speaking elites. The rebellion was crushed, but its aftershocks lasted for decades: waves of French Canadians began quietly slipping across the border into the United States, some intending to return, most never did. Josephte's own family would eventually become part of that story.
There's also a note, tucked into the family records, that Josephte was a descendant of the Acadians — the French settlers who were violently expelled from their homeland in Nova Scotia by the British in the 1750s, an event known as le Grand Dérangement. If true, it means Josephte's family carried the memory of displacement in their blood well before they ever crossed into Vermont themselves.
Married at Sixteen
On February 16, 1841, Josephte married Isaïe-Gédéon Marotte, a young man from Saint-Charles, Richelieu, five years her senior. She was sixteen years old. Over the next 27 years, the couple would have nine children — and live through more heartbreak than most families see in several generations.
A Run of Devastating Losses
Their first daughter, Allemanda, was born around 1845. She died in January 1849, at just four years old. The burial record, written by the parish priest and preserved for 175 years, still survives:
"On the thirteenth of January, eighteen hundred forty-nine, we the undersigned priest buried Allemanda, daughter of Gédéon Marotte and of Marie Josephte Bourgeois... aged four years."
Their second child, Cordelia, born in July 1846, died the following November at just over a year old.
Then came the hardest blow of all. On December 27, 1850, Josephte gave birth to twin girls — Marie Aurélie Malvina and Exilda. Twins were rare and precious in any 19th-century farming family. Within four months, both were gone: Marie Aurélie Malvina died on March 3, 1851, and her twin sister Exilda followed on March 27 — not even a month later. Two babies, born on the same day, dead within weeks of each other.
Of Josephte's first six children, only two — Amanda (b. 1849) and Joseph Victor Horace (b. 1852) — would survive childhood. It's a devastating ratio, but not an unusual one for the era: this was a time before germ theory, before antibiotics, when a fever that seems trivial today could sweep through a household and take every child in it.
Crossing the Border
Sometime in the 1850s, the Marotte family joined the great migration south. By 1860, they were living in Burlington, Vermont — part of a massive wave of French Canadians who left Québec for New England in search of factory work and, in many families' memories, freer air after the rebellion years. Isaïe-Gédéon found steady work as a plumber, a trade he'd hold for the rest of his working life.
It was in Burlington that Josephte gave birth to her final two children: Selena Genevieve in March 1860, and William in March 1868. By then Josephte was in her forties, having spent essentially her entire adult life pregnant, nursing, or grieving — sometimes all three at once.
Death in Burlington
Josephte Bourgeois died on June 7, 1872, in Burlington, Vermont, at the age of 47. She had crossed a border, survived the deaths of at least four of her own children, and built a new life in a new country — and then she was gone, a decade and a half before her husband, and years before she would ever see her surviving children's own families grow.
Isaïe-Gédéon outlived her by 17 years. He moved to Holyoke, Massachusetts, continued working as a plumber into his sixties, and died there on September 14, 1889, of stomach cancer. In a cruel echo, their youngest son William had died in that very same city just a year earlier, on July 18, 1888, at only 20 years old — of consumption, the 19th-century name for tuberculosis, a disease that stalked crowded industrial towns like Holyoke relentlessly.
The Children Who Carried the Family Forward
The three Marotte children who lived into adulthood scattered across New England, each building a full, documented American life:
- Amanda Marotte married Eusèbe Janot dit LaChapelle around 1870 and settled in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, living until 1922.
- Joseph Victor Horace Marotte married Elizabeth LeClair in Holyoke in 1875 and lived an extraordinarily long life for the era, dying in West Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1940 — at 87 years old, having outlived nearly his entire generation.
- Antoine Cyrille Théodore Marotte may be the most thoroughly documented of all of Josephte's children. Census and city directory records trace him from Burlington to Pawtucket, where he worked as a car builder, then to Central Falls, Rhode Island, where he became a house carpenter, and finally back to Burlington, Vermont, where he died in 1921. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1888, married twice — first to Azilda Audette, then, after her death, to Adeline Ratte — and worked steadily as a tradesman well into his sixties.
- Selena Genevieve Marotte, born the same year the family settled in Vermont, married Daniel LaBranche in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1889 and lived until 1925, dying in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Why Her Story Matters
Josephte Bourgeois never held public office, never appeared in a newspaper, and left no photograph that has survived to us. What she left instead is something quieter and, in its own way, more remarkable: a bloodline that survived a rebellion, an international border crossing, a run of infant deaths that would break most modern hearts, and the grinding uncertainty of 19th-century industrial New England — and came out the other side, generation after generation, still standing.
If your family tree runs through Marotte, LaChapelle, LeClair, LaBranche, Ratte, or Audette in Vermont, Massachusetts, or Rhode Island, there's a very good chance the road leads back to a sixteen-year-old bride from Saint-Denis-sur-Richelieu, who buried more children than any parent should have to, and kept going anyway.
Another 2nd Great Grandmother!
