Trombley & Leight Genealogy

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The Tremblay name originates in France in the Normandy region. The earliest known Tremblay is Bernard de Tremblay who died in 1155. Next we find records in 1167 of a Guillaume de Tremblay who made a gift of a vast domain of land to the Trappist monastery. Then we skip to Gervais du Tremblay, a blacksmith, who built a forge on lands adjoining the Trappist monastery in Tourouvre, Perche, France. His descendants continued in this occupation in some line for several generations. One Tremblay of distinction is Father Joseph Tremblay, a man of great influence in the Richelieu administration in the early 1600's.. He was known as the confidant and lifelong associate of one of France's greatest statesman (Quarterly Review, April 1896).
The forefather of Tremblay's in the New World was Pierre Tremblay. He was born at Saint-Malo de Randonnai about 1626.
He came to Canada in August 1647. We are the largest family in North America that can trace their ancestry to one man. He married Ozanne Achon, a "Fille de Roi":The Filles du roi were part of King Louis XIV's program to promote the settlement of his colony in Canada. They arrived in the young colony of New France (Canada) between 1663 and 1673, under the financial sponsorship of King Louis XIV of France. Most were single French women and many were orphans.

Their transportation to the colony was paid for by the King. Some were given a royal gift of a dowry of 50 livres for their marriage to one of the many unmarried male colonists in Canada. These royal gifts are reflected in some of the marriage contracts entered into by the Filles du roi at the time of their first marriages. Some 737 of these women married and the resultant population explosion gave rise to the success of the colony. Most of the millions of people of French Canadian descent today, both in Quebec and the rest of Canada and the USA (and beyond!), are descendants of one or more of these courageous women of the 17th century.

Monument to their marriage, in L'Ange Gardien, Quebec

Commemorative plaque to the women who settled Quebec, Ozanne Achon being among them.

For more info read Les Tremblay by Patrick Chevassu,
published only in French to the best of my knowledge.

Also, a good source of info: Genealogy of Tremblay Family, by James P. LaLone, Jan 1985, Journal of Michigan's Habitant Heritage, Vol 6, #1

Links to other Tremblay web pages

www.genealogie.org/famille/tremblay

http://saglac.qc.ca/~navsig/tremblay/translate.html

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Pointe/8235/Homepage.html

http://www.ziplink.net/~miket/

http://www.familytreemaker.com/users/t/r/o/Liana-B-Trombley

An excerpt from the Rochester, NY Democrat and Chronicle, 10-11-1998, Travel Section, front page. About the first Tremblays to settle in Canada along the St. Lawrence River:

Charm of Charlevoix
St. Lawrence River sets the tone for a landscape and a lifestyle

Travel in the Charlevoix region of Quebec is a family affair.
Pierre Tremblay served us delicious rhubarb-strawberry rolls with crème anglaise for tea at Auberge Beausijour, the inn he owns with his wife at Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rive.
Francine Tremblay covered the official history and juicy gossip of Ile aux Coudres, a speck of land in the St. Lawrence River.
Richard Tremblay told us about going to sea at age 12 in the tiny crew quarters of a lumber schooner.
At Baie St. Paul, a Charlevoix town that’s something of an art colony, we encountered Tremblay beer and furniture and Ecole Thomas Tremblay.
Indeed, Tremblays make up the largest family in North America and are all descended from Pierre Tremblay, who came from Normandy in the 1600’s. He was given a land grant by Louis XIV and settled in Quebec. He had three sons, one of whom moved into the Charlevoix. Some of his descendants had as many as 16 children, in the tradition of large French-Canadian families.
Not until we got to fashionable Ponte-au-Pic did we seem to run out of Tremblays.
The Charlevoix stretches north and east of Quebec City along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River…
The Charlevoix is a land of mountains, forests and the most ancient rocks on Earth in the Laurentian shield. But it’s overwhelming presence of the river-or the beginning of the St. Lawrence Seaway- that dominates the landscape and the way of life…

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Article by Peter Black, Log Cabin Chronicles Posted 06.27.03
Quebec City

PETER BLACK

The Very Large Tremblay Family of Quebec

There is not a stadium in Quebec, nor the rest of Canada for that matter, large enough to accommodate Pierre Tremblay's Quebec family.

For that you'd have to rent a football stadium in the United States. But if you did that and then invited all the American Tremblays, you'd need the world's largest soccer stadium, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which holds about 200,000.

Even at that, you'd have to hope for 60,000 no-shows to be able to fit them all in.

To ponder the spectacular fecundity of the Tremblays is to tremble.

According to figures gathered by the Quebec City-based Association des Tremblay d'Amerique (ATA), there are 80,000 Tremblay ancestors in Quebec alone, or approximately one percent of the province's population. About 30,000 of that vast army populate, one might say dominate, the Kingdom of the Saguenay.

In the small town of Les Eboulements, an hour east of Quebec City, one third of the residents carry the Tremblay name.

This past weekend the ATA brought together a relatively modest gathering of Tremblays in Montreal (Mayor Gerald Tremblay in attendance) to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the organization. The group took advantage of the occasion to launch a volume documenting 66,325 Tremblay marriages dating back to the fabled Pierre, the champion stud from Perche, France.

The ATA claims the Tremblay clan is the largest in North America to spring from the loins of one man.

Pierre's descendants got his name, but it was obviously his wife Ozanne Achon who donated the hardy and fertile genes, and, unfortunately, a propensity for rare genetic disorders in future generations.

Starting at twenty-four years, relatively late for that epoch, Anne Tremblay gave birth to twelve children, only two of whom didn't reach adulthood. She outlived her husband by twenty years, dying in 1707 at age seventy-five. The four sons of Pierre and Anne laid the pillars of what would become the towering House of Tremblay.

Meanwhile, the six Tremblay daughters married and kick-started six other prominent Quebec lineages -- Gagne, Savard, Roussin, Laforest, Pelletier, and Perron.

In June, 1647, Pierre found himself on a ship to Nouvelle France after being seduced by tales of adventure in the wildness spun by a colonial recruiter. He had signed a three-year contract as a worker in the tiny, struggling colony on the St. Lawrence.

After ten years of itinerant farm labour, Pierre married Anne and settled on the family domain at L`Ange Guardien, east of Quebec City. A monument to Pierre and Anne`s genealogical achievement stands there today.

Not for nothing is Pierre Tremblay called the ``father of a people.`` Indeed, in Quebec it's likely there are no more than two degrees of separation between any old stock French-speaking Quebecer and a Tremblay. It is common for any given school class in Quebec to have more than one young Tremblay.

It is this kind of genetic and social interweaving that helps explain the amazing strength and resilience of the Quebecois family and its cousins in the rest of Canada.

Ironically, when Pierre Tremblay embarked from France, never to return as it turns out, the family name was doomed in the homeland. Today the Tremblays of France are few and far between.

So when upwards of 200,000 people gather on the symbolically charged Plains of Abraham in Quebec City for a Fete Nationale concert, as they did this week, it's as much a family reunion as a celebration of political survival.

Come to think of it, the concert site on the Plains actually might be big enough to accommodate all Pierre and Anne`s descendants. Cancel that trip to Brazil.