Rose Bayols (1631 – c.1686)

Rose Bayols is usually identified as the daughter of Nicolas Bayolle. Aged around 5 when Nicolas was listed on the April 1636 voyage of the St. Jehan, it is presumed that she came later, so that by 1649, (aged ~18) she married Pierre Comeau (aged ~52).

She is referred to in the oral history written about her son Antoine¹, who moved to Maine and became Anthony Coombs. The oral history dates to February 1835 and was narrated and written almost two hundred years after the events, from the perspective and belief that Anthony had migrated from France and not French Nova Scotia.

According to this history, Anthony became attracted to Protestantism through a priest's servant, and remembered his mother had never said anything against Huguenots or Protestants, and further had been seen crying at the "execution of the victims" i.e. at Protestant persecutions². Anthony confessed his interest to his mother and was surprised to learn that she was sympathetic, and that she too was secretly Protestant since before the time he'd been born (1661). She believed that if her husband (Pierre Comeau) knew he would betray her and "have her put to death". She helped Anthony get away from Nova Scotia: "She provided him with suitable clothing and gave him a box of money, and contrived to have him conveyed away in a carriage under the cover of night. They parted, never in this world to meet again".³

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Bayon-7

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1. Anthony Coombs and his Descendents (Boston, 1913 12 MB pdf). Original on Archive.org
2. It is doubtful this is accurate, unless Rose Bayols had seen such perscutions in France during the 1630s when she was very young, or during the 1640s when she was an adolescent, and prior migrating to Nova Scotia before her 1649 marriage at age 18.
3. Ibid, p. 17