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chapter eleven The Stateless and the Orphaned among Montreal’s Apprentices, 1791–1842 gillian hamilton In early Anglo-America, as other essays in this volume show, official (“state”) responsibility for orphaned children rested in the hands of local magistrates such as overseers of the poor. In contrast, families in Quebec had official (“state”) responsibility for those children of their relatives who had become orphaned or destitute, until at least the mid-nineteenth century. In that sense, the line between state and family was very poorly defined indeed.1 Peter Moogk explains: “A council of paternal and maternal relations was convened to determine the future of the orphans. Contributions for their upkeep might be apportioned among the kin who elected a tutor...to record and then manage each child’s inheritance as well as oversee the child’s upbringing.”2 If family was not available, widows and other single mothers who were too poor to care for their children took it upon themselves to bind them to another family. To do so, they employed a notary public to draw up an indenture. Notaries kept copies of all of the documents they penned; under French civil law, the terms of these agreements were legally binding. An inventory of the notarial documents of Louis Chambalon,who practiced in Quebec,reveals several such agreements. For example, an adoption agreement signed in 1712 between the mother of a twelve-day-old girl born out of matrimony and the apparently unrelated couple adopting her reads: “Adoption de Geneviève, fille naturelle d’Elizabeth Lemerle, âgée du 12 jours, par François Savary et Catherine Pluchon, de Québec (7 octobre 1712).”3 In another case, a father was ill enough to prompt the mother to find a couple to keep her four-year old child for eleven years: “11 year engagement [contractual agreement] of Marie-Suzanne Letellier, aged 4 years, stateless and orphaned among montreal’s apprentices 167 daughter of Pierre and Marie-Anne Lanseigne, her father being sick in the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Montreal, to Romain Dechambe mason, and Catherine Boismé of Charlesbourg...(26 July 1704).”4 If a mother could afford to care for her children,even her illegitimate children,she could keep them (unlike the situation in Virginia that Brewer describes in chapter 12) and raise them as she saw fit. For example, Mary Mayez, whose husband was “absent,” bound her “natural” (illegitimate) fifteen-year-old son, Alexis Gaudert, to a shoemaker for a four-year apprenticeship in 1812. The boy was to be taught his master’s trade and was even allowed to profit from any work he completed after the workday was over.5 Hence local government administrators played a much smaller role in the placement of orphaned children in Quebec than in many other locations in North America. One question this chapter proposes to answer is whether,in the absence of such governmental supervision, binding out in Quebec proceeded without regard to the family status of apprentices, or if children with family members nearby might have been treated differently from those without. By the early eighteenth century, government officials in Quebec occasionally were involved in the placement of foundlings (abandoned infants). They embraced the use of notary publics, upholding existing indentures and using private contracts drawn up by notaries to place foundlings with foster families. The king’s attorney paid the foster family a fee to take on these very young foundlings (called enfants du Roi) typically until the child reached age eighteen or twenty-one. More often than not, however, foundlings were the domain of private religious institutions. Children abandoned and cared for by foundling institutions (such as the Grey Nuns Foundling Hospital, discussed below) often died before they could be placed out. In the second half of the nineteenth century , orphanages cared for more children in part because they discarded their policy of early adoption. Shouldering the burden of childraising themselves,the institutions kept the children until they were able to “gain a livelihood.”In fact, these church-based orphanages held on to this policy long after other jurisdictions turned to adoption.6 The virtual absence of government or institutions in the care of older orphans (that is, not foundlings) prior to 1850 has implications for the sources of evidence available in early-nineteenth-century Quebec. Systematic records of apprenticeship, from which orphans can be identified, have survived. With the Quebec data, it is possible to compare orphan apprenticeship...

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