Baptism of Catherine Jérémie at Quebec

On 22 September 1664, Catherine Jérémie was baptized in the parish church of Quebec, the capital of New France. Parish registers record her as the daughter of Noël Jérémie, dit Lamontagne, a merchant and fur trader active along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, and Jeanne Pelletier. Her exact birth date was not separately recorded, as was common practice in the colonial period, when baptism—rather than birth—was the event formally entered into ecclesiastical records.

Growing up in a colonial family with connections to trade and exploration along the St. Lawrence, Catherine would have been exposed early to the natural landscape of New France, an environment that later shaped her pursuits as a botanist and herborist. Her baptismal record, preserved in Quebec's parish archives, is the earliest documented fact of her life and forms the basis for all subsequent biographical reconstruction by historians, including the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

This baptismal entry is historically significant not for the event itself, but because it anchors the timeline of a woman whose later achievements—as one of the earliest documented female naturalists and midwives in Canadian history—might otherwise be undatable. It reflects the broader reality that women's lives in 17th-century New France were chiefly documented through religious rites of passage: baptism, marriage, and burial.