Anyone who’s looking into their French-Canadian roots will soon come across this term: fille du roi, or “daughter of the king”. Not to be taken in a literal sense, the filles du roi were a group of some 700 unmarried women who were sent to New France between 1663 and 1673 by King Louis XIV to solve a gender imbalance problem, and ultimately help to populate the new colony. They were called “daughters of the king” because Louis XIV paid for their recruitment, clothing and passage to the new world and offered dowries to the women when they married.
When digging into our family history, I thought it would be really exciting to find at least one descendant who was a member of "Les Fille du Roi". When I started digging though, I was blown away by how many of our lineage where part of this program. We certainly come from an impressive group of pioneer women!
Here are the 24! ancestors from our lineage that can be traced back to the Fille du Roi!
Sources:
https://www.tfcg.ca/filles-du-roi