Every country has a foundation myth and so, too, have some families.

My mother’s family foundation myth was that her mother, Maria Gagnon Roy, was the daughter of a ‘master butcher’ and that she brought an enormous dowry of 40,000 dollars to her 1901 marriage to Jules Crepeau, a hardworking and ambitious 27 year old clerk at Montreal City Hall.

“Jules started out sweeping the floors at City Hall at eight years old,” my mom often said with a tear in her eye but according to his file there his first official post was in 1888 at 15 years old as messenger boy in the Health Department.*

My mother put so much store in this family myth that she even attributed her 5 foot 8 and a half inch height (tall for a French Canadian) to the fact she came from butchers. All that good steak they ate!

The Father-in-Law: Maria’s Dad

My great-grandfather, Louis Roy, (circa 1843 to 1900) was the son of Pierre Isaac Roy and Natalie Jobin of Montreal and he worked as a butcher from 1860 to 1900. He came from a long line of butchers. In 1865 Louis Roy married Melina Gagnon, whose mother, Eleanore Ethier dit Lamalice,¹ came from butchers as well.

At first Louis worked alone at St. Laurent Market and then from 1881 to 1896 he partnered with a J. Lamalice, likely his cousin. Roy et Lamalice had two stalls, 16 and 17, at that market in the south central part of the city near what is now Chinatown. Their partnership was dissolved in 1896 when Louis’s son, also Louis, entered the profession.

L. Roy and J. Lamalice paid a good sum of money, perhaps 200 dollars a year a piece,² to have these two stalls at St. Laurent Market.

According to a University of Laval thesis,⁴ butchers in Montreal were politically influential. Public markets were designed around their needs, in large part because of the slew of health regulations around the slaughter and sale of meat. Retail butchers also profited greatly at these public markets, more so than their private counterparts, sometimes only having to work 2 or 3 days a week to pay the bills.

Louis Roy and his ‘small’ French Canadian family, wife Melina, son Louis and daughters Eugenie and Maria, lived at various addresses early on, then moved to 357 Amherst around 1880 and then in 1890 to 515 Amherst, a brand new ‘small cottage.’

L. Roy et J Lamalice advertised regularly in all the Montreal papers, usually a little blurb like this.

They sometimes put in bigger ads

And they gave to charity, as well, Notre Dame Hospital and the Public Welfare are two examples I discovered.

It may be significant that in 1891 Roy et Lamalice brought the City of Montreal to court. They complained that the City wasn’t doing enough to keep private butchers the mandated 500 yards away from the public markets.

I have to wonder if this is where Louis Roy, master butcher, first met – or maybe locked horns with – the City Hall up-and-comer Jules Crepeau, messenger boy in the Health Department – but a boy gifted with a superb memory for regulations and by-laws.³

In 1896, Jules Crepeau, Second Assistant City Clerk, was assigned the post of Secretary of Public Markets, a suitable promotion considering his Health Department roots.

In 1900, a year before his marriage to Maria Roy, he would be involved in his first scandal at City Hall, one that involved butchers. Men in that trade claimed that aldermen were illegally charging them 50 dollars to have their stalls moved at the prestigious Bonsecours Market. Jules testified in Court and denied knowing anything about it.

In 1900/1901, the newly widowed Melina Roy rented out her Amherst house (yes, to a butcher) and moved to Notre Dame street to live with her married daughter, Eugenie, her husband Jacques (James) Deslauriers (son of a butcher who was deceased). She brought her young adult children Maria and Louis along. The Census man came around while she was there.

The Marriage of Jules and Maria

After my grandparents Maria and Jules got married on July 1, 1901, widow Melina and her grown up son Louis moved back into 515 Amherst with the newlyweds.

In late 1901, Jules applied for a permit to build a three story brick building worth 3,000 dollars at 513 Amherst next door and the next year he would rent it out to three different families.

Maria would very soon give birth to my Uncle Louis. (Louis was baptized exactly nine months after the wedding.) My Aunt Alice would arrive a year after that and in 1905 the Crepeau family would move to St. Hubert Street near Marie-Anne.

Melina Roy and her son Louis, Melina’s orphaned niece Laura, and possibly the Deslauriers would stay at 515 Amherst for a year until Melina’s death in 1906 upon which time Jules would sell the ‘small cottage.’

The Dowry

A notarial record reveal there was, indeed, a 1901 marriage contract for Jules and Maria from June 27, a few days before the marriage, but of course there are no details so no proof of a 40,000 dollar dowry.

It does look like Jules came into some money early in his marriage. He builds that brick triplex and then moves in 1905 to what is still a very tony area with tall elegant stone townhouses.

Before his marriage, Jules was making around 700 dollars a year at City Hall, a middling/good salary for a family man although at one point he asked for 248 dollars in overtime because “over a forty day period I worked 348 hours until four in the morning and on Sundays.”*

Still, a 40,000 dollar diary for Maria’s marriage seems highly unlikely. (That’s 1,500,000 in today’s money.)

I am doubly skeptical about the big dowry because I did not find any contract listing for the 1897 marriage of Maria’s older sister, Eugenie, to Jacques (James) Deslauriers, merchant. This suggests Eugenie received no formal dowry.

Why the second daughter and not the first?

Also, If Louis Roy, successful master butcher, left behind a large estate why did Melina Roy rent out her modest Amherst home after he died and move in with her daughter Eugenie and the husband. To help with the grandchildren?

Lovell’s Directory to the Rescue.

When I first looked for Jules and Maria on the 1901 automated census I found neither one. Maria was erroneously listed under Deslauriers and Jules wasn’t there.

So, it took me years, but eventually I consulted Lovell’s to discover that prior to his marriage Jules was living on Mentana Street in the Le Plateau Mont Royale with his widowed mother, Vitaline Forget Despaties Crepeau, and his three brothers, the older Isadore and the younger Roderick and Paul.

Isadore in that era is already working in insurance – as he would for the rest of his life. In 1898 Roderick is listed as a plumber, then a year later as a butcher. His brother Paul makes the Lovell’s listing in 1899 and is listed as a butcher working at “R. Crepeau and Freres.”

It’s all very suspicious because the highly regulated butcher trade wasn’t something you could jump in and out of. I suspect older brother Jules, son of a mere house painter, pulled some strings to get his younger brothers a short cut into that lucrative trade. (Neither man would remain a butcher for long.) If my grandmother’s family tree proves anything, it’s that the butchers of Montreal liked to keep it in the family!

So, I still have no concrete proof but it would not surprise me if my grandmother Maria’s dowry, whatever the true amount, was provided by a group of butchers (perhaps all members of her extended family) in return for Jules’ support at Montreal City Hall.

Prior to his marriage to my grandmother, Maria Roy, as I said, Jules had had plenty of chance to interact with these ‘politically influential’ tradesmen.

Anyway, that was simply business as usual in those days.

1. Eleanore Ethier dit Lamalice was also a distant relation of Jules Crepeau through the Ethier line of Lachenai Seigneury. See my Why My Grandfather had a lot of Gaul on this site.
2. This is the sum that Louis Roy cites in his 1896 complaint as reported in the French papers. It’s called a license of 200 dollars to have a stall at St Laurent Market. In the 1920’s the sum is just 50 dollars a stall, I discovered in another online item but by then the butchers are paying hefty income taxes, so they mention how high this income tax is in their complaints.
3. Le Devoir says Jules’ mind was like a bank vault holding within all the city by-laws. This was in his 1938 obituary.
4. YVES BERGERON:LES ANCIENNES HALLES ET PLACES DE MARCHÉ AU QUÉBEC :ÉTUDE D’ETHNOLOGIE APPLIQUÉE. University of Laval Thesis Canadian Thesis portal

5. Newsy items courtesy of BANQ newspaper archive.