How your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents met and fell in love.
MEETING MR. RIGHT
Meeting that special someone can be a real challenge. Back when Canada was New France, it was even harder. Few women wanted to pay the cost of an arduous passage and then try to eke out a living out of an unsettled frontier. Therefore, most of the early settlers in New France were men. The gender imbalance worried officials, who saw that the English colonists were rapidly outnumbering the French. Furthermore, many of the voyageurs and couriers du bois married Native American women, which gave them an advantage in trading but made French officials worry about settlers going native.
Their proposed solution? Recruit French women to come to the New World. Between 1663 and 1673, around 800 young women took up the challenge. They were known as the “Filles du Roi,” (women of the King) because King Louis XIV’s government sponsored their passage.
DOWN ON THE FARM
The women, most between 12 and 25, were chosen for their health and good character. Most were lower class, though there were a few impoverished nobility to pair off with officers and gentlemen. Most were also from the cities, which meant that they had to get used to backbreaking agricultural work.
Surprisingly, despite the odds, most of the stories of the Filles du Roi had happy endings. The majority found husbands; the gender imbalance in the colony also meant that those who weren’t happy with the men they became engaged to could break up with him and find another.
Thousands of present-day Canadians are descended from the Filles du Roi. And so are luminaries such as Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, and Hockey Hall of Famer Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion.
Lightning strikes the CN Tower an average of 75 times per year.