The family today

The Courtien Family

The Courtiens are an American family, French on one side and Irish on the other. The name came out of France, crossed to Canada, and reached New York before the turn of the last century. Five sons of one generation served, in the Army, the Marine Corps and the merchant service. The greatest number of Courtiens are still in New York, with others across the country. They are great Americans in the plainest sense of it: they came with a trade, they worked, they served, and they stayed.

The name

Origin

Courtien is an uncommon name, found chiefly in France. Fewer than a hundred people carried it in the United States at either of the last two censuses, and in France only eighty-one births were registered under it between 1890 and 1990, in two small pockets. One of those is the Sarthe, and that is where this family comes from: Sarce, a village in the country south of Le Mans, where they are in the parish register from 1741. They came to Sarce from Coulonge, a few miles off, by way of Aubigne. The men of those first generations were a winegrower, a mason and a stonecutter; the farming came later. No surname dictionary records what the name means.

From 1763 the French clerks wrote it steadily enough. Courtien in the baptism of that year, in the marriage at Mayet in 1800, in the births at Sarce in 1847 and 1850, and in the Paris death act of 1908, with one act in 1839 adding a t on the end. In America it took sixty years to settle. The same Manhattan household was entered in the censuses as Courtin, Constien, Courteen and Courtier before a census taker wrote Courtien in 1940.

Before 1763 they wrote it both ways. The same man is Courteau in the priest's hand and Courtien in his own, over and over, at Coulonge, at Aubigne and at Sarce. The records that show it are set out in full.

Henri Courtien of the Sarthe is among the names for 1914 on the war memorial at Coulonge, the parish the family had come from two centuries earlier. Whether he was a relative is not known.

Out of Sarce the family went three ways. Paul crossed to Montreal and his son went on to New York. Paul's brother Ariste went to Paris and was a concierge in the faubourg Saint-Honore. Their parents and their sister moved south to Tours.

Sarce, in the Sarthe

Michel and Marie

Michel Courtien was born at Sarce, a village in the Sarthe, at nine in the evening on 4 September 1807, and his father carried him in to register the birth the next day. The first witness was his uncle Jean. His mother was Anne Fontenay, and both his parents were alive in 1839 to consent, before a notary at Mayet, to their son's second marriage.

The elder Michel was baptised at Sarce on 9 September 1763, a son of Jean Courtien and Madeleine Martineau, who had married in the village in 1741. Jean was a mason and later a stonecutter, and nine of their children are recorded at Sarce. He married Anne Fontenay at Mayet on 30 May 1800; she was born at Sarce in 1773, a daughter of Julien Fontenay and Catherine Dufour, and his brothers Jean and Charles stood as witnesses. He farmed at Sarce all his life and died there on 29 April 1841, the death reported by his son, who gave his age as thirty-three. Jean and Madelaine are the oldest Courtiens the family can show a record for.

He married twice. His first wife was Adelaide Louise Legeay, and they had a son, Auguste Ferdinand, in January 1836. She died at Sarce on 23 April 1838. Thirteen months later, on 10 May 1839, he married Marie Tertrain, twenty-five and born in the same village, a daughter of Michel Tertrain and Marie Desnos. Her grandfather, another Michel Tertrain, stood as a witness at seventy-two. The two families had been close for generations: a Michel Tertrain had been godfather to Michel's own father in 1763.

Michel was a merchant in 1836, a weaver by 1839 and a farmer by the time his later children were born. Ariste arrived in June 1842, Paul Ambroise on 4 April 1847 and Justine on 1 September 1850, the second of them registered with two of her Tertrain uncles standing as witnesses, one of them a farrier. By 1869 the family had moved south to Tours, where Michel and Marie were still living when their children married.

France to Canada

Paul and Philomene

Paul Ambroise Courtien was born at Sarce on 4 April 1847 and registered the next day, his father reporting the birth. He became a cook, and by 1871 he was in Montreal, where on 11 October of that year he married Philomene Larocque at Notre-Dame-de-Montreal.

The Montreal register names both sets of parents. His were Michel Courtien and Marie Tertrais, by then at Tours. Hers were Napoleon Larocque and Marie Leblanc Robillard, of Saint-Michel-de-Vaudreuil, west of the city, where Philomene had been born on 1 October 1845 and baptised the same day.

Two years earlier his sister Justine had married Theodore Sorin at Tours, on 8 February 1869. She was eighteen and a lingere, and had been born at Sarce on 1 September 1850. Both her parents were there, and Michel signed the act.

They had six children in Montreal. Three sons grew up: Victor in 1874, Hippolyte in 1876 and Henri-Paul in 1879. Louis George was buried in 1884 and Andrea in 1912, and a daughter, Justine Philomene Marie, was baptised in 1885. Henri-Paul stayed in Quebec and died at Saint-Hyacinthe in 1952.

By the spring of 1901 Paul was living in Hippolyte's household in the Saint-Louis quarter of Montreal, where the census of that year entered him simply as pere. He died on 7 July, and was buried from Notre-Dame two days later. Philomene outlived him by twelve years and was buried from the same church in September 1913, entered in the register as his widow.

The first generation in America

Victor and Ellen

Victor Paul Courtien, the eldest of the three, was born in Montreal on 29 October 1874 and came to the United States about 1890. There is no record of his arrival and there never was one: Washington did not begin recording Canadians who crossed the land border until 1895. He most likely took a train from Montreal and simply stayed. He was a janitor in Manhattan, as his uncle Ariste was a concierge in Paris.

Ellen White came the other way. She was born at Mount Bellew in County Galway on 10 July 1880 and baptised two days later, a daughter of Patrick White and Mary Quinn, with a sister Honor and a brother Thomas. She sailed on the SS Majestic and landed on 8 September 1898, eighteen years old, going to a sister already in America. Her name is White in the Irish records and Whyte in the American ones. So the line is French on one side and Irish on the other.

They raised nine children in Washington Heights, at the top of Manhattan: Mary, Teresa, Margaret, Victor, John, Francis and Helen by 1915, then a gap of five years before Arthur, whom the family called Jimmy, and Thomas.

Ellen died in Manhattan on 12 March 1943, aged sixty-two. Victor outlived her by twenty-four years and died in 1967, aged ninety-two. They are buried together at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, in Westchester.

The next generation

Thomas and Agnes

Thomas Martin Courtien Sr. was the youngest of the nine, born in New York City on 21 December 1921. He went to DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, and during the war took a degree in engineering at the US Merchant Marine Academy.

Agnes Anne Lightbody was born in Manhattan in 1923 and grew up in Pelham. Her father Robert died in 1933. She trained as a nurse and was still working as one in 1950.

They met before the war at the Catholic summer camp at Cliff Haven in upstate New York, and married on 7 July 1946 at St. Catharine's Church in Pelham. By 1950 they were in Yonkers with three small children. Ten more followed.

He went to sea for Moore McCormack Shipping and was a lieutenant in the US Naval Reserve, then spent the rest of his working life with the Department of the Navy, latterly as Director of Materials for the Military Sealift Command. He retired in 1981.

Agnes died in 1992, at sixty-eight. Thomas outlived her by eighteen years and died at Mount Vernon on 6 January 2010, at eighty-eight. Of the nine children raised in Washington Heights he was the youngest, and the last. They rest together at Beechwoods Cemetery in New Rochelle, and he left thirteen children, twenty-five grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren behind him.

Family tree

The line

1. Jean Courtien and Madeleine Martineau · Sarce, 1741
2. Michel Courtien and Anne Fontenay · Mayet, 1800
3. Michel Courtien and Marie Tertrain · Sarce, 1839
4. Paul Ambroise Courtien and Philomene Larocque · Montreal, 1871
5. Victor Paul Courtien and Ellen Whyte · New York, 1890
6. Thomas M. Courtien Sr. and Agnes Lightbody · Pelham, 1946
7. Thirteen children, and the generations after them

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Military history

The sons' service

All five of Victor and Ellen's sons have a service record: three in the Army, one in the Marine Corps, and the youngest in the merchant service. Francis enlisted at Camp Upton in August 1941, four months before Pearl Harbor. Thomas served on troop transports in the Atlantic convoys and the Pacific.

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Sources

Where this comes from

Every part of this rests on a record: parish and civil registers at Coulonge, Aubigne, Sarce, Mayet and Tours, the Montreal marriage and burial registers, the American censuses, the New York City vital indexes, the Army enlistment file, and published obituaries. Most of the French acts are on the site as images, so the wording here can be held against the page it came from.

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The businesses

Family businesses

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