The genealogy presented in these chapters will follow this line of Diels: (1) Philippe Diel & Marie Anquetin, (2) Charles Diel & Marie Anne Picard, (3) Charles Diel & Jeanne Boyer, (4) Eustache Diel & Therese Rivard dit Lacoursiere, (5) Amable & Marie Therese Faucher, (6) Amable & Euphrosine Brunet, and (7) Louis Daniel Guiel & Mary Melanie Edwidge Chagnon. All siblings and spousal lines are presented here in tabular form as completely as possible.

If searching for ancestors is to be a worthwhile pursuit, it must first of all be honest and accurate, free of pretentious, preconceived notions of ancestral greatness; and, it should go beyond lists of dates and vital statistics. It requires an attempt, at least, to understand the times in which they lived and to acquire a feel for what their daily lives entailed, to learn how they coped with the forces of history, why they relocated, and what they accomplished. These chapters trace Diel, Guiel, Yelle ancestors back to early 17th century France from the time of King Louis XIII.

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Descendants of Philippe Diel and Marie Anquetin

Philippe's world: 17^th Century France

France in the 1600s divided society into three classes known as estates with a king reigning over all three in varying degrees of authority over time. The First Estate, less than 2% of the population, was the clergy whose job it was to register births, marriages, and deaths, provide schools, hospitals, relief for the poor, and to dictate morality. They wielded considerable authority and used it to maintain among the general populace those political, social, economic, and moral attitudes that would first and foremost serve the monarchy and the privileges of the clergy itself. Among these was the tenet that the king ruled by Divine Right.

The First Estate was itself divided into the high clergy and the low clergy. The high clergy - abbots, bishops and cardinals - constituted only about 10% of the First Estate, were often from the nobility, or the Second Estate, were rich, and owned free of taxation 10 to 15% of the land. They collected tithes, or taxes, from the Third Estate - peasants and bourgeoisie - to maintain parishes, but that money was often salted away in private coffers of the corrupt high clergy. To proffer opposition to these few was to risk being charged with heresy and suffering a horrific death if convicted. The other 90% of the First Estate, the lower clergy, were priests, monks, and nuns of modest means, at best, who actually administered religion to the people.

The Second Estate was the nobility, less than 1% of the population, who owned more than 30% of the land tax free, who were wealthy, who collected taxes from the peasants, and who had power in government, something Louis XIV wanted to prevent.

Louis wanted to curb the power of the nobility as did his father, Louis XIII, not to protect the commoners but to make his rule absolute. He was cautious, however, not to push them into revolt as his father had. He appointed intendants to collect taxes and administer his government, relieving the nobility of that capacity. At the same time, he called the high nobility into his palace where he required their presence if they were to retain pensions and privileges. He allowed them to live lavishly and to busy themselves with nothing more than ceremonial duties. In this way, the old, powerful nobility or noblesse d'epee, the nobility of the sword, faded from power, replaced by the noblesse de robe whom the king could dismiss at will. Louis had achieved the absolute power he believed was his god-given right - one faith, one law, one king. In the midst of all of this, the state teetered on the brink of bankruptcy; and a heavy tax burden was placed on the peasants and bourgeoisie who were in fact France but, as individuals, owned very little of its land or wealth. The first two estates had nearly complete control over the remaining 98% of the population. Advancement out of the Third Estate was not impossible or forbidden but very improbable.

Philippe Diel and Marie Anquetin (Hanquetin or Anctin), his wife, were born some time around 1620 in Normandy, France. Little is known about them, but they are the earliest known ancestors of many Canadian and U.S. families with variants of the Diel surname and with origins in France. Dielle, Dyelle, Gale, Guel, Guelle, Guiel, Guielle, Guyelle, Hielle, Hyelle, and Yelle are among them with Yelle being the most common. Dyel¹ is another form of the name since i's and y's were pretty much interchangeable in early French, and that name will get special attention. Philippe and Marie are known to us only because the two Canadian marriage records of their son, Charles Diel, mention them by name. The first record states that Philippe was a laboureur, a "ploughman in life", living in Ste. Colombe, Normandy and that both parents were dead at the time of his marriage in 1676. The second record from 1702 says that Philippe and Marie were form Saint-Rémy Parish in Dieppe. No parish records of their births, deaths, or marriage can be found, their parents are unknown.

There are many reasons why, after three and a half centuries, records can't be found. Beyond the obvious possible reasons of natural decay, water damage, fire, carelessness, and wars, there are other possibilities that will probably forever remain nothing more than conjecture.

In 1939, Father Alexandre Aubert of Ste. Colombe writing to Monsignor Emile Yelle of Quebec referred to Philippe and Marie's son, Charles Diel, as "the exiled colonist". The letter went on to inquire into the moral or mental, intellectual, and religious condition of the Diel family in Canada and to say that Ste. Colombe had "remained very Catholic". That suggests that there was some doubt in the priest's mind as to the moral, intellectual, or religious condition of the Diel family in Canada.

It is possible, therefore, taking into consideration the history of France and the strange content of Aubert's letter, to conjecture that the "exiled colonist" was removed from France and from his parents' care because they were accused of being Huguenots, Protestants, or heretics of doubtful moral, mental, intellectual, or religious character. In such cases parish records of heretics were often expunged as though those people never existed. Although Philippe and Marie lived before 1685, when Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau revoking the Edict of Nantes, Huguenots were being oppressed at that time and many tried to leave the country. Records exist in Ste. Colombe which indicate Diel marriages into families with common Huguenot names - Delaporte, Du Plessis, Le Roux, Lesaunier, Neel, and others.

It is also possible that Philippe and/or Marie simply succumbed to the prevailing conditions in France at that time. Philippe was a laboureur which translates into ploughman in English, but laboureur should not be confused with common laborer or day worker. Laboureurs ranked high in the rural social order. In rural areas, people were less rigidly cast into social orders than were urban dwellers, but there was a hierarchy with laboureurs, small farmers, and day workers ranked in that order. Below the nobles, only the legal families enjoyed a higher status than laboureurs. In better times a laboureur would have had a reasonably comfortable life in farming and would have owned land, teams of draft animals, and equipment for tilling. He would have been well paid for his skill and knowledge in agriculture, but agriculture went into a serious decline during the Religious Wars (1562 - 1598). Rural areas like Ste. Colombe often fell victim to marauding troops. Recovery started when the wars ended but stagnated again by 1625, about the time of Philippe's birth. The rain and cold weather of the coldest century of the "little ice age" brought on famine when harvests failed. France suffered economically from the protracted wars of Louis XIII that demanded a high rate of taxation. The Thirty Years War ended in 1648, but civil strife, a mini-civil war known as the Frondes, caused additional turmoil from 1648 to about 1652; and France continued war with Spain over dominance in Western Europe until 1659. France emerged the dominant power in Europe, but the expected economic recovery was dampened by the great three-year famine until 1662. Life for Philippe and his family could not have been easy.

Although Louis XIV, the Sun King, had come of age in 1651, he didn't assume full power over the government of France until 1661 upon the death of Cardinal Mazarin who, from the time Louis became king at the age of four, had shared royal power with Louis and his mother, Anne of Austria. Louis set about to improve France's economy, appointing Jean-Baptiste Colbert to the office of Superintendent of Finances with the intention of developing trade and industry to expand France's agriculturally based economy. Louis did attempt to alleviate the miserable conditions but not to the extent that it would interfere with his quest for greatness or curb his appetite for war. His ambition was to establish absolute power for himself without interference from the nobility, to expand his empire and embellish it with fine arts and lavish buildings. France might have been recovering, but it's citizens were still poor. Even with the shortage of manpower due to epidemics, famine, and war, industrialization of the economy could not provide livelihoods for the hungry and the destitute masses.

By 1660, there was a lull in the turmoil of war with Spain and the Hapsburgs. Louis appointed Alexandre de Prouville, Marquis de Tracy to the office of Lieutenant-General and Governor of New France (and of all trans-Atlantic possessions of France, actually) in November 1663. Appeals for help from the colony of New France, nouvelle-France, finally got the attention of Colbert and the king who, for the time being, were not concentrating on war. They had plans of making a self sustaining colony that could provide France with lumber for ships, copper, fish and grain, and fur for the European market in exchange for manufactured goods from France.

The Compagnie de la Nouvelle France had not after several decades succeeded in attracting colonists to remain in Canada to create a thriving colony, so the king requested that it give up its monopoly, which it did. Louis then gave the monopoly to the Compagnie de la Indes Occidentales, making it a royal corporation with rigid control over the colonies by way of monopolistic control of all commerce; but, the plea from the colony was for troops to protect the settlers from hostile natives, namely the Mohawk tribe of the Iroquois nation who had attacked the colonists and disrupted trading for fur with friendly natives. If the plans for the colony were to succeed, the first order of business was to remove the Iroquois threat. Colbert informed the colony that the king had ordered a "good regiment" to be sent to their aid. Tracy had departed to the Antilles² with four companies of Infantry on 26 February 1664 so Colbert was not able to inform him until months later that a regiment would be dispatched to Canada in the following year and that he, Tracy, would be joining them.

The regiment of choice was the Carignan-Salières Regiment which had recent combat experience but was not well equipped and had some undermanned companies. Finding recruits was the responsibility of individual company commanders who would send out a recruiter with a drummer to entice the economically deprived townsmen into military service. Often recruiters met hostility among residents who resented the presence of troops they had to billet and feed and who recruited able bodied men who were in short supply. However, on this occasion, recruiters found easy pickings among the destitute and desparate who were willing to risk the unknown in favor of the dismal existence they knew. At the same time, many junior officers tried to avoid going to the remote colony where they feared they would be unnoticed and passed over for promotion.

Colbert's cousin, Colbert de Terron, intendant of Rochefort, was given the responsibility of mobilizing the regiment for deployment in Canada. He ensured that the regiment was well equipped for the conventional European warfare he was familiar with. Twenty fifty-man companies were set to sail for Canada and would be joined in Canada by Tracy's four additional companies. In spite of his efforts and those of Jean Talon, the newly appointed intendant of New France who would sail with the regiment, the regiment would find itself ill-equipped to fight in the harsh Canadian winter or against the Indians' style of warfare. Be that as it may, the Iroquois threat had to be neutralized to protect the fur trade, the profits of which were badly needed to bolster the economy of France and upon which the very survival of the colony depended.

On the 24th of May 1665, the last two regimental transport ships, Saint-Sébastien and La Justice, each carrying four infantry companies of the Carignan-Salières Regiment, departed La Rochelle bound for the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River and Quebec. Aboard the Saint Sébastien were Jean Talon, newly appointed intendant of New France, and Daniel de Remy de Courcelles, the new governor of the colony who would serve under Alexandre de Prouville, Marquis de Tracy. Charles Diel was also aboard the Saint-Sébastien.

1. Dyels

Philippe Diel might have been related in some way to the noble Dyels that also lived in his part of Normandie as there are records of them attending Diel weddings in Ste. Colombe.

2. Tracy

Tracy went to the Antilles to restore order in those colonies one of which was Martinique. Jean Dyel had been Governor and Lieutenant General there since 1662 when his cousin, Adrien Dyel, Seigneur de Vaudrocques died and who held that position since the death of his uncle, Jacques Dyel du Parquet, in 1658.