Rose Otis

Abt 1677 - 1729  (~ 52 years)

• Name	Rose Otis  [1]
  Birth	Abt 1677	Cocheco near Dover, Strafford, New Hampshire   [2, 3]
  Gender	Female
  Death	6 Jul 1729  [2, 3]
  Alternate death	7 Jul 1729  [4]
  Burial	7 Jul 1729	Charlesbourg, Québec   [2, 3]
  Person ID	I32370	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others | Ancestor of WPF
  Last Modified	18 May 2021

  
  

  Father	Steven Otis,   b. Abt 1652   d. 27 Jun 1689 (Age ~ 37 years)
  Mother	Mary Pitman
  Marriage	16 Apr 1674	Dover, Strafford, New Hampshire   [2, 3]
  Family ID	F19174	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Jean Poitevin dit Laviolette,   b. 14 Sep 1672   d. 3 Feb 1752 (Age 79 years)
  Marriage	29 Oct 1696	Beauport, Québec   [2, 3, 4]
  Children	+ 1. Michel Poitevin,   b. 2 May 1712
  Family ID	F19173	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	20 Mar 2021

  
  

• Notes

  Rose Otis was her birth name. Captured by the Abenaki in the same 1689 raid on Cochoco, New Hampshire in which her father Steven Otis and grandfather Richard Otis were killed, she was taken to Québec and baptized Françoise. Multiple French records call her François Rozotty. She became a naturalized citizen of New France in 1710. Her precise identity was long in dispute -- was she a daughter of Richard Otis, and if so, by which of his three wives? Or was she a granddaughter? Two sons of Richard's son Steven, Stephen and Nathaniel, were known to have been taken captive and sent to Quebec, where they married and lived out their lives. (Nathaniel was rebaptized with the name Paul.) Could she have been their sister? This was finally resolved in 1988 when Sister Annette Potvin, a nun in Alberta, Canada, obtained a copy of the marriage contract between Jean Poitevin and Françoise Rozotty. The document describes her as "françoise Rosotis, daughter of deceased STINODIS and the deceased MARY OTOS, her father and mother, of English birth in the environs of Boston." "Boston" was a common term among Quebecois for most of New England, and "Stinodis" is a very plausibly what a French scribe would write when hearing the name "Steven Otis." This is all thoroughly documented in Roger W. Lawrence's 1989 "The Identity of Rose Otis" (citation details below), but somehow this information has never managed to make it across the border between Canadian and American genealogical scholarship. Richardson's 2013 Royal Ancestry still lists her as a child of Richard Otis and Rose Stoughton, who were really her grandparents. So does Gary Boyd Roberts's 2018 The Royal Descent of 900 Immigrants.

  
  

• Sources

  [S142] Royal Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families by Douglas Richardson. Salt Lake City, 2013. [S38] Genealogy of the French in North America, by Denis Beauregard. Complete version, 2024. [S5201] Roger W. Lawrence, "The Identity of Rose Otis." The Genealogist (the journal of the American-Canadian Genealogical Society) #41 (v. 15, no. 3), p. 38, Summer 1989. [S660] Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire by Sybil Noyes, Charles Thornton Libby, and Walter Goodwin Davis. Portland, Maine: Southworth Press, 1928-1939.