Théodule Anctil dit St.Jean is the father of Nyzaire, the ancestor of all of the St.Jean/St.John families in the upper St.John River valley. Théodule and his wife Sophie Rose spent their lives in the area around Île-Verte in Québec. Nyzaire however moved sometime around 1860 from Quebec to the area around today's St.John Plantation, where in 1861 he married Christine Ouellette. Nyzaire and Christine spent their lives in the area around St.John and St.Francis Plantation.
Why ANCTIL-ST.JEAN?
The last name St. John is an anglicized version of St.Jean, and seems to have shifted in the case of my ancestors about two generations back. More puzzling seems to the the name ANCTIL; as you can see, the family name is here written ANCTIL-ST.JEAN. More correctly the name would be written Anctil dit St.Jean. In other places it's written as simply ANCTIL; indeed, descendants of the Anctil-St.Jean family in Quebec often now go by the single surname Anctil.
This is an example of what are called "dit" names, which are a kind of double family names rather common in French Canada. People with such family names could be listed in official records under either of the names or both of them, hyphenated. (Here's more information on dit names from Denis Beauregard.) In this case, the ancestor of all Anctil-St.Jeans in North America, Jean-Bapiste-Louis, used the dit name St.Jean, as did his father Louis; this dit name thus dates back to at least the end of the 1600s in Normandy.
Descendants
and Ancestors of Théodule ANCTIL-ST.JEAN and Sophie Rose MARQUIS
The earliest discovered St. John (St.Jean)
ancestor: Louis Anctil dit St.Jean of
Normandy, France, lived at the end of the 1600s and beginning of the 1700s.
The earliest discovered Marquis ancestor,
Charles Marquis of La Rochelle in Poitou,
France in the early 1600s.
Message Board: Posts
on Theódule St.Jean & Sophie-Rose Marquis
Surname List
Index of Names
Sources (Bibliography)
Return to home page of Ancestors
and Cousins of Nellie and Lucas
Return to the Upper
St.John Valley Communities Page
(a great-great-great grandson of Théodule Anctil-St.Jean and Sophie Rose
Marquis)