Montour family
family of Native American and French descent
The Montour family is a family of Native-American and French descent that was prominent in colonial New York and Pennsylvania before and during the American Revolution. Because of the Iroquois practice of reckoning descent through the female line, the family is known as "Montour" after the matriarch.
Madam Montour
Madam Montour (1667–c.1753). Information on Madam Montour is fragmentary and contradictory. Even her given name is uncertain.
According to her own account:
she was born in Canada, whereof her father (who was a French gentleman) had been Governor; under whose administration the then Five Nations of Indians had made war against the French, and the Hurons and that government (whom we term the French Indians, from espousing their part against the English, and living in Canada) and that, in the war, she was taken by some of the Five Nations’ warriors, being then about ten years of age, and by them was carried away into their country, where she was habited and brought up in the same manner as their children.
Current research indicates that she was born Élisabeth (or Isabelle) Couc around 1667, in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, the daughter of Pierre Couc (ethnic French) and Marie Mitouamegoukoue (Algonquin).
She was apparently married three times, the last to an Oneida man named Carondawanna (Karontowá:nen—Big Tree). He later took the English name "Robert Hunter" after the Governor of New York, whom he met at the Albany Conference of 1711. Madam Montour had at least several children with Carondawanna:
Andrew (Sattelihu)
Margaret, known as French Margaret
a daughter, who may have been named Catherine
Lewis (Tau-weson)
Henry (most sources say Henry and Andrew were the same person: "Andrew Montour who by the name of Henry Montour,"—from his land grant)
Carondawanna was killed about 1729 in battle with the Catawba; after the death of her husband, Montour moved with her family to Otstonwakin, on the Lawi-sahquick (Loyalsock Creek), now Montoursville, Lycoming County, Pennsylvania.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Montour family” as family of Native American and French descent. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as family of Native American and French descent. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23138266. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1667, 1753, 1711 and 1729.
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This entry incorporates text from “Montour family” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.