Pierre-Auguste Tardif was born in 1852 and married Françoise Bodet around 1874, likely in the region of Juigné-les-Moutiers, France, where he passed away on January 5, 1889. His death record states:
« On the sixth day of January, eighteen eighty-nine, the body of Pierre Tardif, husband of Marie Bodet, who passed away yesterday in Haut-Breil, aged 36, was buried by us, the undersigned priest, in the presence of Jean Esnault and François Hervé, who declared they could not sign. »
For unknown reasons, possibly due to extreme poverty, Françoise Bodet was persuaded to emigrate to Canada with her six children: Jeanne, Pierre, Auguste, Jean, Alexandre, and Emile—the latter born on April 20, 1889, a few months after his father’s death. It appears that local priests financed their journey. They arrived in Ste-Rose-du-Lac, Manitoba, around 1894. Pierre-Auguste never came to Canada, but he was the patriarch of this family, which settled there and grew into a sizable lineage. Among his six children, three sons—Jean, Alexandre, and Emile—ensured the continuity of the Tardif name, which soon evolved into Tardiff.
The parish of Ste-Rose-du-Lac welcomed its first settlers in 1889, establishing them on fertile land suitable for livestock. The Tardiff family settled on a plot west of Ste-Rose, still occupied today by Louis Tardiff. Eventually, three sons—Alexandre, Jean, and Pierre—each acquired their own land. All the children married in Ste-Rose-du-Lac, except Jeanne, who wed Prospère Echelard, also from France, in 1894. They later moved to Havre, Montana, where they ran a store and rented houses. Françoise Bodet, Jeanne’s mother, joined them in May 1914 and passed away there on November 25, 1915. One of the sons, Auguste, also moved to Montana, where he died in Havre in 1933.
Years ago, Yvonne Tardiff Fitzmaurice, granddaughter of Pierre-Auguste and daughter of Alexandre, traveled to Havre, Montana, to locate her grandmother Françoise Bodet Tardiff’s burial site. She encountered difficulties even identifying the family name, as her grandmother had been recorded as Cardiff instead of Tardiff! Members of Jeanne Tardif Echelard’s family in Montana were buried in the Highland or Calvary cemeteries.
Most of Pierre-Auguste Tardif and Françoise Bodet’s descendants remain in Manitoba.