From Aunis to the New World — three centuries, two oceans, three countries
The family began, as best we can tell, in a small Atlantic province of France called Aunis — a low, marshy coast of salt flats and vineyards wrapped around the ancient port of La Rochelle. A young man named Antoine Baudrias, born around 1650 to Léonard Boudrias and Jeanne, left that coast sometime before 1689 and sailed across the Atlantic to New France. He was, most likely, a soldier of the King.
He settled at La Prairie near Montreal, married a young woman named Jeanne Plumereau in June 1689, farmed a forty-arpent habitation at Lachine, fathered eleven children, and was buried at Notre-Dame de Montréal in January 1730. He signed a passenger list as "Antoine Beaudrias-Versaille" — Versaille, not yet Labonté.
The Labonté nickname came later. One of Antoine's grandsons, serving in the colonial militia, picked up the flattering military nom de guerre — la bonté means "the goodness" or "the kindness." It stuck. By the time descendants were crossing into the United States in the 19th century, most branches had quietly dropped "Baudriau" and kept "Labonté," which American clerks then shortened to LaBonte.
The family lived through the fall of New France in 1759, British rule from 1763, the American invasion of Quebec in 1775–76 (one Pierre Antoine Beaudriau dit Labonté is documented as having fought on the American side), the Patriote Rebellions of 1837–38 in the very villages of the Richelieu where they farmed, and finally the great 19th-century exodus that sent roughly 900,000 French Canadians south into the United States between 1840 and 1930.
Aunis was, from 1374 until the French Revolution, officially the smallest province in the kingdom of France. Charles V carved it out of neighboring Saintonge and centered it on the fortified port of La Rochelle, with a short Atlantic coastline and the islands of Ré and Aix. It sat on a chalk plain descending gently from Poitou to the sea, stitched together by salt marshes, vineyards, and drainage canals. The Revolution dissolved it into Charente-Inférieure in 1790 — renamed Charente-Maritime in 1941. The old name survives in the "Pays d'Aunis" around Surgères, Marans, and La Rochelle.
Four commodities defined rural life when Antoine was a boy. Salt harvested from coastal marais salants was the white gold of the Atlantic, shipped to northern Europe by the ton. Wine exported to England and Holland since the 12th century was gradually distilled, over the 17th, into cognac and the local fortified aperitif Pineau des Charentes. Cod from the Grand Banks and oysters from Marennes-Oléron filled out the maritime economy.
Commoners lived in whitewashed single-story houses with orange-tiled roofs. They paid the royal taille and the church tithe, worshipped in Romanesque parish churches, and followed a year ordered by the vendanges in autumn and the salt harvest from June to September. Daily bread was rye and buckwheat; Sunday's feast was salted fish and pea soup. A laboureur's life was hard, but it was not serfdom — he owned his land, could sell it, and voted on local militia matters.
Antoine Baudrias almost certainly grew up in a household of this kind, speaking a Saintongeais-inflected French whose echoes you can still hear in Quebec pronunciations like moé and toé.
La Rochelle's defining ghost-story is the Great Siege of 1627–1628. By the 1620s, the city was France's second or third largest, with around 27,000 people and a quasi-independent Protestant government trading freely with England and Holland. Cardinal Richelieu saw this autonomy as incompatible with royal absolutism. After a failed English intervention by the Duke of Buckingham on Île de Ré, royal engineers built a 1,400-meter seawall across the harbor mouth. When the city finally surrendered on 28 October 1628, famine and disease had reduced the population from 27,000 to about 5,000.
Fifty-seven years later, Louis XIV's Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685 outlawed Protestant worship altogether. Between 200,000 and 400,000 Huguenots fled France — but not to New France. The crown required that all settlers in Canada be Catholic. This matters: Antoine Baudrias was Catholic, because no one else was allowed across. By the time he sailed around 1689, La Rochelle had been a royal Catholic port for two generations.
The historian Louis Pérouas showed that more than two-thirds of the settlers who embarked through La Rochelle came from just four neighboring provinces: Aunis, Saintonge, Poitou, and Angoumois. Of roughly 10,000 French emigrants who settled permanently in Canada between 1608 and 1760, a disproportionate share sailed from this one coast.
The mechanism was the engagé system. A young man signed a notarized three-year contract (the famous "36-mois") with a merchant, religious house, or colonist. The patron paid his one-way crossing, food, and lodging. After his term he was free — and most took a land concession as a habitant. No engagement contract for Antoine has ever surfaced. That absence, plus his passenger-list name "Beaudrias-Versaille," strongly suggests he arrived not as an engagé but as a soldier in the Troupes de la Marine.
Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebec City, was born just south of Aunis at Brouage in Saintonge around 1570. Pierre Dugua de Mons, who financed and co-founded Acadia and Quebec, was also a Saintongeais. The coast Antoine left was, in a very real sense, the founding coast of French Canada.
The surname Baudry — with its regional variants Baudriau, Baudriault, Boudriau, Boudrias, Beaudriau, Baudrier, and Baudrillart — descends from the Frankish personal name Baldric, a warrior compound of bald ("bold, audacious") and ric ("powerful, ruler"). It was one of hundreds of Germanic prestige-names the Franks brought into Gaul that became the stock of baptismal names across medieval France.
The shift from Baldric to Baudri follows two regular sound-laws of Old French: vocalization of l before a consonant (Bald- → Baud-) and weakening of the final velar in -ric to -ri. By the 11th century, charters alternate freely between Baldricus and Baudri.
Western France added diminutive suffixes. -eau / -iau is the Poitevin-Angevin diminutive, -ault is its western graphic variant, and -ias is the Aunis-Saintonge phonetic flavor of the same suffix. So Baudrias, the form Antoine's name was recorded under, literally means "little Baudry, spelled the way Aunis farmers said it." Quebec scribes of the 1690s wrote down what they heard — Bourdria, Boudrias, Beaudrias, Baudriau — and the spelling drifted by generation.
The medieval record of Baudrys reads like a minor annals of France. Baudri de Bourgueil (c. 1046–1130), abbot of Bourgueil and archbishop of Dol-de-Bretagne, wrote a celebrated chronicle of the First Crusade and 256 Latin poems. Baldéric of Noyon-Tournai (d. 1112) laid the first stone of Tournai Cathedral's choir. Two prince-bishops of Liège bore the name in the 10th and 11th centuries. Baudry le Teuton, an early 11th-century German knight, came to Normandy and founded the Norman house of Courcy — one of whose descendants fought at Hastings in 1066.
The closest thing to a royal connection the name can claim is Saint Baudry of Montfaucon (c. 568–630), founder of the first abbey in Argonne. Hagiographic tradition makes him a son of the Merovingian king Sigebert I of Austrasia, which would give the name a genuine Frankish-royal origin-story. Historians treat this as pious legend rather than documented pedigree.
The shield at the top of this page is a red field crossed diagonally by a silver baldric — a soldier's sword-belt slung across the body from shoulder to hip. It is an old French device, simple and commoner in origin, and it rests on a pun.
In Old French, a baudrier is a baldric. Medieval heralds loved puns, and families named Baudry adopted this image as armes parlantes — "speaking arms" — a small visual joke that said the name aloud.
It is not a noble coat of arms. Several wealthy Baudry families in France — the Baudry d'Asson of Poitou, the Baudry d'Anjou, the Baudry du Theilleul of Normandy — did register distinct arms in the royal armorials of 1696, and those arms belong to their descendants, not to ours. Antoine Baudrias of Aunis was a commoner; no arms were ever recorded for his line.
The baldric device is the generic canting arms of commoner Baudry families, recorded in the old Armorial poitevin as the blazon that bourgeois and laboring Baudrys could legitimately use — not because any one family "owned" it, but because any Baudry could claim the pun. French heraldic law never restricted arms to the nobility; roughly seventy percent of the 115,000 arms in the 1696 royal armorial belonged to commoners.
So this emblem is chosen, not inherited. Chosen honestly, as a name-heritage device. The sword-belt also happens to suit the story: Antoine sailed to New France as a soldier of the King, and his descendants picked up the military nickname Labonté in the colonial regiments. A baldric on a shield is, fittingly, exactly the kind of thing a soldier of the Troupes de la Marine would have worn.
Gules, a baldric in bend sinister argent, buckled Or.
In plain English: a red shield, a silver sword-belt running diagonally across it from upper-right to lower-left, with a gold buckle. The motto that pairs naturally with it — Fortitudo et Bonitas — binds the Frankish meaning of Baldric ("bold ruler") to the soldier's nickname Labonté ("goodness") in one line: "Strength and Goodness."
Antoine was born around 1650 in Aunis, France, son of Léonard Boudrias and Jeanne "Aromour." He married Jeanne Plumereau on 2 June 1689 at Notre-Dame-de-La-Prairie-de-la-Madeleine. They had eleven children, all baptized at Sainte-Anges de Lachine between 1692 and 1711. He worked as a laboureur on the Cuillerier farm at Lachine in 1693, and bought a 40-arpent habitation for 200 livres in November 1697. He died 20 January 1730 and was buried the next day at Notre-Dame de Montréal. He is PRDH individual #4213.
The specific French parish where he was born or baptized is not known to any published source. Fichier Origine — the authoritative Franco-Quebec register of verified French origins — has no fiche for Baudrias, Baudriau, Boudrias, or Beaudriau. Every reputable source gives only "Aunis (Charente-Maritime)."
His mother's surname, "Aromour," does not match any recognized Aunis or Saintonge name in French databases. It is almost certainly a phonetic mangling by a Quebec priest of a surname he'd never heard — likely Amoureux, Lamoureux, Amoreau, or Armand.
The family took root in the Richelieu Valley south of Montreal — the parishes of Chambly, Verchères, and Saint-Mathias-sur-Richelieu. This corridor had been fortified in 1665 by veterans of the famous Carignan-Salières Regiment and settled afterward, thickly, by soldier-habitants and their sons.
An 18th-century habitant held a long narrow strip of land running back from the river — a censive — inside a seigneurie. He paid a symbolic annual cens and a modest rente to the seigneur on St. Martin's Day (November 11), ground his wheat at the banal mill, and owed a few days of corvée labor at harvest. He was not a serf; he owned his land in all but name, could sell it, and voted on local militia matters.
The year followed a rhythm any farming family would recognize: spring plowing and sowing of wheat, peas, oats, and rye; a pause on St-Jean-Baptiste Day (June 24); haying in late July; the wheat harvest in late August, cut by sickle; threshing by flail through autumn; and ice-cutting in winter. Women spun wool from household sheep into the rough étoffe du pays. Men wore the hooded capot cinched with a ceinture fléchée against the long Canadian winter.
The parish was the universe. Every baptism, marriage, and burial went into the Catholic register — which is why Quebec's vital records today are among the most complete anywhere in the Americas. Every male 16 to 60 was enrolled in the militia, likely to be called up against Iroquois raiders, English fleets, or Mohawk war parties.
French Canada produced more than 7,500 secondary surnames over its history — what genealogists call dit names, from the French dire, "to be called." The system was so widespread that by the 18th century, most habitant families carried at least one. A typical Quebec farmer might be baptized Jean Baudriau, enlisted as Jean Baudriau dit Versaille, and recorded in the land register as Jean Versaille. Any of the three names was legitimate.
Most dit-names came from military service. A captain would bestow, or a recruit would adopt, a short vivid handle for the muster roll. They fell into neat families:
Onomastic dictionaries classify Labonté as a soldier's nickname meaning "the kindness" or "the goodness." It is rare as a surname in France itself, but it flourished in Quebec precisely because so many former soldiers carried it home to their farms.
In the Baudriau line, the name first appears consistently with Pierre Antoine Baudriau dit Labonté and his brothers in the mid-18th century — likely sons of a Pierre Antoine Baudriau who married Marie-Anne Bombardier dit Labombarde, herself from another soldier-settler family. ("Labombarde" was the artilleryman's nom de guerre.) Two soldier-dit families marrying into each other is the quiet signature of Richelieu Valley society in the mid-1700s.
Three flags over the same farm.
The Baudriau dit Labonté family lived through the Seven Years' War (1754–63) at the very center of the action. The Richelieu Valley was the invasion corridor between Lake Champlain and Montreal; its habitants were mobilized continuously, and its young men scattered across the Compagnies Franches. They experienced the siege of Quebec in 1759, the death of both Wolfe and Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, Lévis's fleeting victory at Sainte-Foy, and the capitulation of Montreal on 8 September 1760. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 handed New France to Britain.
A remarkable footnote sits inside the family's history. A Pierre Antoine Beaudriau dit Labonté is the subject of a 2005 article in the American-Canadian Genealogist (issue 103) titled "A Canadian in the American Revolution." He was apparently among the small number of Canadians who joined the American rebel side when Generals Montgomery and Arnold invaded Quebec in 1775–76 — a path taken by perhaps a few hundred habitants, despite the Catholic Church's strong counsel to stay loyal to the British Crown.
Most habitants stayed neutral. The Quebec Act of 1774 had guaranteed their Catholic religion, their French civil law (the Coutume de Paris), and their seigneurial tenure. This act — one of Britain's "Intolerable Acts" in colonial American eyes — is why French civil law still governs private life in Quebec today.
The next two generations lived through the constitutional turmoil of Lower Canada (1791–1841), the rise of the Parti patriote under Papineau, and the Patriote Rebellions of 1837–38, fought in the exact Richelieu villages — St-Denis, St-Charles, St-Eustache — where so many Baudriau dit Labonté cousins farmed. Then came the hangings at the Pied-du-Courant prison, the humiliating Durham Report, and the Act of Union of 1841.
French-Canadian survival under British rule rested on the "three-legged stool": the Catholic parish, the French language, and extraordinary fertility — the revanche des berceaux, "the revenge of the cradles." Habitant families commonly produced 8 to 15 children per generation.
It was in this long 19th century that the compound name "Baudriau dit Labonté" collapsed into plain "Labonté." British census takers and English-speaking notaries simplified; the rare and unstable French original lost out to the short, sturdy nickname. By roughly 1850–1880, most branches had dropped "Baudriau" and kept "Labonté."
900,000 French Canadians, and the Labonté family among them.
By the middle of the 19th century, the seigneurial belt along the St. Lawrence could no longer feed its children. Quebec's population quadrupled between 1784 and 1844. Arable land barely expanded. The Hessian fly and wheat midge ravaged crops from the 1830s. The 1844 potato blight struck Quebec as it struck Ireland. Then came the industrial suction from the south — New England textile mills, Midwestern logging camps, and cheap rail tickets on the Grand Trunk Railway after 1853.
The result was what French-Canadian historians call the Grande Saignée, the "Great Bleeding." Roughly 900,000 French Canadians emigrated to the United States between 1840 and 1930, with peak intensity from the Civil War through the 1890s. Perhaps half eventually returned. The rest, and their children, became Franco-Americans, speaking a distinct New England French and clustering in compact urban neighborhoods they called Petits Canadas.
The big four capitals of Franco-America were Lewiston (Maine); Manchester (New Hampshire), where nearly half the city was Franco at peak, working the Amoskeag textile complex — once the largest in the world; Lowell (Massachusetts); and Woonsocket (Rhode Island). Each had its own French-language parishes, parochial schools, newspapers, caisses populaires (credit unions — the first U.S. credit union, St. Mary's Bank in Manchester, was founded in 1908 by French Canadians), and chapters of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste. The ideology of la survivance — survival of language, faith, and culture — knit the diaspora together.
Labonté was a classic Franco-American mill-town surname. American clerks anglicized it a dozen ways: LaBonte, Labonte, Labonty, Labountee, Labounty. Dropping the acute accent was nearly universal.
Read literally, there is no evidence of royal or noble blood in any Baudriau / Boudriau / Labonté line. The documented French ancestors were commoners: Antoine's father was Léonard Boudrias of Aunis, a man with no noble particle before his name.
Read sympathetically, though, the tradition captures something authentic about French-Canadian history. Three legitimate "royal connections" apply to almost every habitant family of this profile.
A Compagnie Franche de la Marine recruit literally wore the King's livery, was paid from the royal treasury, and served under officers commissioned by Versailles. The very existence of a military dit-name in the line — Versaille for Antoine, Labonté for his descendants — is strong evidence of soldier ancestors serving the Crown.
Between 1663 and 1673, roughly 770–850 Filles du Roi — "King's Daughters" — came to New France under Crown sponsorship. They were not princesses; they were orphans and farm girls from the Paris Hôpital Général, Dieppe, Normandy, and Aunis. But they were literally wards of Louis XIV, escorted across the Atlantic on the King's account, and dowered from his treasury. About two-thirds of all French Canadians alive today descend from at least one, so the odds are extremely high that a Labonté tree contains one. "Connected to royalty but not royals themselves" is almost a perfect paraphrase of the Filles du Roi program.
Whether given by an amused captain or chosen by the recruit, the nickname Labonté suggests a soldier known as good-natured, generous, or kind — the kind of man his comrades and neighbors would remember fondly. Liked by the people is built into the name.
The honest version: the Baudriau-Labontés were not royals. But they served royalty, they may well have married into the King's wards, and they carried, for three centuries, a name that insisted — with the gentle irony typical of French-Canadian humor — that their ancestor had been a good man.
Three centuries in one view.
Ancestors, relatives, and famous bearers of the name.
Where to walk the ground the family walked.
Three sites in the capital connect directly to the New France story before heading west:
The TGV INOUI from Paris Montparnasse to La Rochelle-Ville runs about seven direct services daily in 2h 28m to 2h 41m. Advance fares from around €19–30; walk-up €40–70. May–June and September are the sweet spots.
In priority order:
The Aunis-Saintonge table is one of France's most distinctive and least touristed. Look for:
For drinks: Pineau des Charentes chilled as aperitif; cognac (Hennessy, Martell, Rémy Martin, and Courvoisier run tours from €15); and, for the table, Beurre Charentes-Poitou AOP on pommes de terre de l'Île de Ré.
What the records prove, and what is still a good story.
| Claim or Tradition | Assessment |
|---|---|
| Family came from France | Documented. Antoine Baudrias from "Aunis, France" is in Quebec sacramental records. |
| Name means "bringer of goodness" | Partly. La bonté does mean "goodness." But it's a later soldier's nickname — the older name Baudriau / Baudry actually means "bold ruler." |
| Connected to royalty | Not by blood. No noble particle in any documented ancestor. But likely served the King as a soldier, and plausibly married into the Filles du Roi — the King's wards. |
| Liked by the people | Built into the name. "Labonté" is literally a nickname for a kind man. |
| Antoine was "dit Labonté" | Unlikely. His passenger-list name was "Beaudrias-Versaille." "Labonté" enters the family with his grandson's generation. |
| France → Canada → U.S. | Fully documented. The classic French-Canadian migration path. |
| Specific French parish of origin | Not known. Only "Aunis" is documented. Fichier Origine has no fiche — no one has yet located his French baptism. |
| Mother's surname "Aromour" | Almost certainly garbled. Not a known French surname. Likely Amoureux, Lamoureux, Amoreau, or Armand, misheard by a Quebec priest. |
| A Labonté in the American Revolution | Documented. Pierre Antoine Beaudriau dit Labonté — subject of a 2005 American-Canadian Genealogist article. |
If you want to keep digging.