Colonial Notaries

I’m reading a book about colonial Arkansas called, appropriately, Colonial Arkansas 1686-1804. It is by Morris S. Arnold.  If you click the link you will find out that Mr. Arnold is a federal judge in the 8th Circuit.  But the link won’t tell you about this book, just that he has a keen interest in history.  Someone should update the wikipedia entry to tell people about this book.

I’m really enjoying reading it, maybe because it is written by a lawyer.  He puts together a great narrative but always tells the reader what is fact and what is speculation.  And he has a good sense of humor.

It is filling in some gaps in my knowledge of colonial French history. It also has some useful information on French (and Spanish) legal process.  Last week when I was writing about finding Jacques/Jean Baptiste LeBeau I wrote about how my dad had found the marriage contract for his wife’s second marriage.  I said that St. Louis was a big enough town to have a real notary who kept these records. Now that I think about it some more, and look at some copies of marriage contracts, St. Louis didn’t always have a notary.  Often the post commander acted in lieu of the notary. But it did have a good record system so we can still look at all these contracts.

I didn’t describe the French notary process in that post, but Judge Arnold does it very well in this book and I thought I’d share it with my readers.

To an American common lawyer, the notary is not a member of the legal profession, not even a paralegal.  But in seventeenth and eighteenth century France he enjoyed a much more elevated status, as indeed he still does in that country.  Originally an official of the medieval European ecclesiastical courts, the notary developed into a full-blown, noncontentious secular legal professional in France. In England, partly because the canon and secular laws were not on speaking terms, “the notarial system never took deep root.” For one thing, an important aspect of the notary’s duties, his authority to authenticate documents, was of little use to the English.  The whole notion of a state-sanctioned authenticator of private acts was entirely foreign to English common law; whereas in France we see notaries making or passing contracts, the common law left that to the parties.  The state was very much in the background in England and was called upon only to enforce obligations that arose by force of nature.

… the eighteenth century French notary’s duties [included] the drafting of documents, conveyancing, and the giving of practical legal advice.

Judge Arnold later describes a typical marriage contract under French Law.  That made my pull out my marriagae contracts and look at them.  And as long as I have them out I thought I should share one with you, my readers.

I’m using, as an example, a contract for a second marriage.  This contract between Marguerite DesRosiers, the widow of Antoine Barada, and Joseph Sorins (sometimes spelled Saurins) was made in 1782 in St. Louis, Spanish “Illinois”.   The entire midwest was at one time called the Illinois country.  After it was partitioned, the portion in Spanish Louisiana was still called Illinois.

Keep in mind that although Marguerite DesRosiers without a doubt spoke French, and may have spoken very little Spanish, St. Louis and all of Louisiana was under Spanish rule at the time.  So all contracts have this odd blend of Spanish and French which, when translated into English, is apparent mostly in the names. The names are almost always mispelled and use the Spanish rendering.  Hence Marguerite becomes Margarita.

The contract begins by naming the parties.  Notice how the person with the most descriptive words is Francois Cruzat, the Lieutenant Governor.  Normally the contract would be made before a professional notary but often the commander of the post would be the notary if there wasn’t a “real” notary available.

In the town of St. Louis of Illinois, the thirteenth day of the month of April in the year one thousand, seven hundred eighty-two, before me, Don Francois Cruzat, Lieutenant Colonel of the Infantry, Captain of the Regiment stationed in Louisiana, commander in chief and Lieutenant Governor of the Western part of Illinois and the amended districts andin the presence of the attending witnesses, Antoine Cutian and Joseph Bernes, personally appeared Joseph Sorins, residing in the said town of St. Louis stipulating for himself and in his name party of the first part

And Margarita De Rosier, widow of Antoine Barada, deceased, stipulating for herself and in her name, party of the other part,

Then the contract goes on to name the people who are “standing up” with the bride and groom.

Which parties, with the advice and counsel of the relatives and friends here present and herein after named to wit:  On the part of Joseph Sorins, Joseph Marie and Renato Cruyan, residing in the aforesaid town,

And on the part of Margarita DesRosier, Baptiste Becquet and Gabriel Dodier, here present all relative and friends.

Marguerite DesRosiers and her deceased husband, Antoine Barada, had many children and one of them, Louis Barada, married Marie Becquet, the daughter of Baptiste Becquet. Gabriel Dodier was Baptiste Becquet’s brother-in-law, the uncle of Marie Becquet.   I don’t know who the men standing up for Joseph Sorins were.  But the whole point is that the two people are doing this as part of a community who have advised them on this matter.  

Once the parties and witnesses are named, the contractual provisions begin. 

Which parties and witnesses have made and agreed between themselves to the matrimonial convention as follows to wit:

As Judge Arnold writes:

The provisions typically found in marriage contracts executed in accordance with eighteenth-century Parisian notarial practice are well known.  The first and invariable undertaking by the future spouses was a promise to celebrate their marriage in church, and the parties would then choose the regime that would govern their property during the marriage.  Next would come a declaration that the ante-nuptual debts of the parties were to remain their separate obligations; this was foll0wed by a disclosure of the parties’ assets, a requirement of the validity of the provision regarding debts.  The dowry brought to the marriage by the wife was then recited; and delineating preciput, the right of the spouse to specific property in the event of a dissolution of the community, frequently followed. Finally came the donation clause, usually a reciprocal grant of all or part of the predeceasing spouse’s estate. 

This contract is, of course, under Spanish Law since Illinois in Louisiana was under Spanish Rule. So they reference the law of Castille and the “Recompilation of the Indies” which was a set of statutes that governed the American colonies.  Marguerite Barada had existing children and this contract references the terms of the contract she had with her first husband, Antoine Barada (which I don’t think we’ve ever found).  The blank is, I believe, in the original (although maybe it was just illegible, I don’t recall).  Under this contract, unlike Judge Arnold’s usual contracts, the debts of the spouses are not kept separate but are to be paid out of the community.  Perhaps because of this, there is no listing of the assets of the parties or of any dowry. 

First: The said Joseph Sorins and the said Margarita Desrosier, have promised and do promise to take each other with the counsel of their relatives and friends, in the name and according to the matrimonial laws and to have their marriage celebrated before our mother the Catholic and Apostolic and Roman Church as soon as possible or as soon as one of the parties shall require it of the other.

2nd: The future couple shall be one and in common as regards all the goods they actually possess, those they may acquire in future and the said future husband declares that if he should die first, all their goods shall belong to the future wife so that none of these nearest relatives can claim any thing nor establish any rights thereto. This donation thus made, provided there be no children born of the said marriage for if there be any the said community shall be regulated according to the law of Castille and the Recompilation of the Indies, and the goods which the said future wife brings into the community shall be divided in equal parts between the children born of her first marriage and those which may be born of this present marriage according to the terms of the contract executed between her and her first husband, deceased, on the second day of October in the year One thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty. 

3d.: The future couple wish that all the goods accruing to their community which they this day establish shall belong to the _____ if there be no children; and in case of children shall be divided according to the terms aforementioned.

4th: The said future couple have covenanted that all the debt contracted either by one or by the other party before the celebration of this present marriage shall be paid out of the goods of their actual community.

For thus has been covenanted and agreed between the parties, promising, accepting, and those who do not know how to write have made their customary marks before me and the aforesaid attending witnesses who have signed with me,  Lieutenant Governor, the same day, month and year as above written.

A copy of the contract was kept with the official records of St. Louis and this one can be found in the Colonial Book 3, item 188 #2063. According to Judge Arnold, if they had been living under French law the contract would have had to have been registered with the superior council in New Orleans to be valid.  I don’t know if it was necessary, under Spanish Law, to send a copy to the Cabildo in New Orleans.

Mound City

One of the (many) nicknames for St. Louis is Mound City.   Across the river from St. Louis is the interpretive center for the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site where archaeologists have spent years investigating the culture of the long lost Mississippian mound builders.  The mounds were originally on both sides of the river though and were spread throughout the site that is now St. Louis.  Over the years they were destroyed as structures in the city were built.

Now there is only one remaining St. Louis mound, the Sugarloaf Mound.  It is the subject of many trivia questions.  It is located in the back yard of a house that sits right next to I-55 and most people don’t even notice it.  Recently the house was put up for sale and speculation arose as to who would buy it or if the mound would be sold separately. 

To look at the advertisement, the two bedroom, two bath, white brick bungalow at 4420 Ohio Street wasn't anything flashy -- just 900 square feet on a little more than half an acre -- but it did boast "some of the most spectacular and active views of the Mississippi River and its barges."

More exceptional, though, was this brief note: "Circa: Prehistoric." That's right: Though the dwelling at 4420 Ohio was built in 1928, the site itself has history dating to the Pre-Columbian era, sometime around 1050 A.D.

Photos by Rachel Heidenry | Beacon intern

In an unexpected turn of events, the Osage Nation ended up purchasing the property.

Their ultimate goal is to purchase the lower platforms, as well, remove the houses, restore the mound, and develop it as an interpretive education center where St. Louisans can learn about their city, visitors can explore Mississippian culture, and the Osage people can reconnect with their past.

I think that’s very cool.  I can’t think of a more perfect group to preserve the heritage of the mound and its builders while educating people about the Osage People:

Sugarloaf Mound is a reminder of cultures past and present and will continue to teach many the historical significance of the ancient Osage. The interpretive center that will be built here will teach children and be the voice of the great nation of the Osage. Great Nations never cease to exist if the children remember them and teach their children.

Anniversary of the Publication of To Kill A Mockingbird

Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird is turning 50. The following is something I wrote in January 2009 called You Should Read To Kill A Mockingbird. It is my blog post that continues to get the most hits - probably from school kids who have to write papers.

YOU SHOULD READ TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

And so begins To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper's Lee's beautifully written coming of age story set in small town Alabama in the 1930's. There have been critics who have complained that the language used by the narrator is too "adult" for a child. But the age of the narrator isn't at all clear. The story of Jem's broken arm occurs over a three year period when the narrator is between six and nine years old - but the narrator is looking back at those years from the distance of a greater age:

When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident.

How many years? She never says. But even these discussions about the accident took place in an earlier time:

I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.

I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn't run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn't ? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right.

Despite the critics, most people love the voice of Jean Louise Finch, who is known to almost everyone in the novel as Scout. It is an adult voice recreating the thoughts of childhood. Don't we all remember ourselves as more verbal than we really were as children?

It is a distinctive voice and distinctively southern. She weaves information into the story in a roundabout way, the way a conversation happens in real life. In those first few paragraphs she gives us a picture of the nature of the relationship between Scout and Jem, she relays the importance of Atticus, their father, as a source of all wisdom for them and she introduces the names of most of the other principal characters: the Ewells, Dill, and Boo Radley. She paints us a picture without us even knowing it.

A few pages later, Harper Lee shows us she is just as skilled when she is overtly painting a picture:

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks; the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some of the people: Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.

I love those paragraphs. I love the way she signals the story's time period without actually naming the year. I love the alliteration: rainy /red; grass grew; sagged/square; dog/day; hitched/Hoover; flicked flies. I love the phrase "sweltering shade". And the slow moving people - you can just hear the prolonged first syllable in the southern pronunciation of ambled and shuffled.

She evokes the day-to-day life of children very well. When I was a child we were allowed to go up the street as far as the alley at the top of our block and down to corner at the bottom of the street and we had to be home before the street lights came on. As a child I would have given you my opinion on every person who lived on my street; I knew them all either to talk to or to talk about. Harper Lee paints a similar picture of Jem and Scout's childhood:

When I was almost six and Jem was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries (within calling distance of Calpurnia [the cook]) were Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose's house two doors to the north of us and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We were never tempted to break them. The Radley Place was inhabited by an unknown entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end; Mrs. Dubose was plain hell.

But even though some things remind me of my youth, Maycomb did exist in another time and in some ways another world; definitely a pre-1960's world. And the casual way in which the children take that world for granted, the good and the bad, can sometimes be jarring. For instance Jem (aged 9) explains to the new boy Dill (aged 7) that Maycomb is much smaller than Meridian, Mississippi; it doesn't even have a movie theater:

"Don't have any picture shows here, except Jesus ones in the courthouse sometimes," Jem said.

And later Scout, relating the story of the arrest of a white man for disturbing the peace, casually relates that the "Sheriff hadn't the heart to put him in jail alongside Negroes" so the prisoner was locked in the courthouse basement. You can take that sentence at face value as you read it; but on a second reading of the novel, after you know the whole story and you know that Scout is writing this with the advantage of twenty-twenty hindsight, you realize that Harper Lee is making a statement about the Sheriff and about the fact that attitudes like this were taken for granted.

In the first chapter, Harper Lee paints us a picture of Dill, the new boy who is spending the summer in Maycomb. He is very small ("Sitting down, he wasn't much higher than the collards.") and "a curiosity."

He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned up to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duck fluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead.

Knowing that Dill was based on Harper Lee's real life childhood friend, Truman Capote, makes the descriptions even more fun.

The other character she introduces is the mysterious Boo Radley, a person who never leaves his house and whom the children have never laid eyes on. Mark Twain had nothing on Harper Lee when it came to describing the imaginings of children:

Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out when the moon was down, and peeped into windows. When people's azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work. Once the town was terrorized by a series of morbid nocturnal events; people's chickens and household pets were found mutilated; although the culprit was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in Barker's Eddy, people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions. A Negro would not pass the Radley Place at night, he would cut across to the sidewalk opposite and whistle as he walked. The Maycomb school grounds adjoined the back of the Radley lot; from the Radley chicken yard tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard, but the nuts lay untouched by the children: Radley pecans would kill you. A baseball hit into the Radley yard was a lost ball and no questions asked.

Because the narrator is not, in fact, six years old, she follows this description with some actual facts about the Radleys, but still told from the point of view of children. In laying the stage for the children's project to get Boo Radley to "come out" Harper Lee also sets the stage for the reader to start comparing the fathers in the story. She has already, in one sentence, shown us that the children respected their father Atticus. She then relates the story, to the extent known, of the relationship between Mr. Radley and his son Arthur.

It is interesting that only one person expresses judgment on Mr. Radley in the hearing of the children. On the day that Mr. Radley died, the children stood on the porch with Calpurnia, their cook and almost surrogate mother, to watch the commotion up the street as the body is taken away.

"There goes the meanest man ever God blew breath into,"murmured Calpurnia, and she spat meditatively into the yard. We looked at her in surprise, for Calpurnia rarely commented on the ways of white people.

In the first chapter Harper Lee doesn't just set the scene, she begins the action. Dill wonders what Boo Radley looks like.

Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that's why his hands are bloodstained -- if you ate an animal raw you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.

"Let's try to make him come out," said Dill. "I'd like to see what he looks like."

Dill then dares Jem to run up and touch the Radley house; the first raid on the Radley Place.

Read this novel. You won't be sorry.

Investigating Mr. LeBeau

I’ve learned a lot of things from working with my dad on our family genealogy. I’ve learned a lot about parts of American history that aren’t covered in American History classes, or are covered only perfunctorily. I’ve learned a lot of facts. But the most important thing I’ve learned is to approach the whole endeavor with an open mind. I’ve learned to ask myself if what I believe to be true really is true or whether it is something I simply assume to be true.

In the comments to my post about Jean Baptiste LeBeau I listed some of the sources I and my dad used to try to track him down. But I want to tell the story of how we discovered he existed at all. It is a story of mistaken assumptions. Finding the existence of Jean Baptiste LeBeau, voyageur, made me realize how important it is to regularly question my assumptions.

About ten years ago my dad got a call from a man on the west coast who thought we might be distantly related. The man’s family had originally come from St. Louis and the man had hired a professional genealogist in St. Louis do some research for him. The man had taken the ancestral names he was provided with and had done a little work to discover if any descendents might still be living in or around St. Louis. He discovered my uncle who put him in touch with my dad - “he’s the one you should talk to; he’s the one that knows the family histories.” The man and my dad figured out that, yes, they were probably related. The connection appeared to be the family of my great-great grandfather – a man named Charles Dumont. And the only thing my family had ever known about Charles Dumont’s heritage was that he was supposedly born in St. Charles, Missouri and his father had come from Canada.

MISTAKEN ASSUMPTION NUMBER ONE: Neither my dad nor I had, at that time, bothered to research the Charles Dumont line because the word “Canada” stopped us. I think we assumed that it would be difficult to do any type of genealogical research on Canadians. Would it involve a trip to Canada? If so, we had no idea what part of Canada the father of Charles Dumont came from. I think we assumed that researching this branch would be harder than other branches and so we put it off for the future. We ended up being wrong about this. Researching your French Canadian ancestors turned out to be incredibly easy compared to researching other nationalities. There are compilations of records that give good starting places. And the French Canadians seemed to document everything with contracts and those contracts give you lots of clues in your research.

During the conversations between my dad and this distant relative, the man very generously offered to share with my dad the research that he had compiled with the help of the professional genealogist. He asked my dad to use the information freely but to share with him any additional information my dad came upon that would correct or complete the information on that branch of the family. My dad said he would be glad to look at it. I remember that he was excited to get it but didn’t seem too sure that he could add anything. At that time my dad was still a novice researcher. That was about to change.

MISTAKEN ASSUMPTION NUMBER TWO: In looking at the research sent by our west coast distant relative, we saw that he had taken the family back pretty far through the female lines. We hadn’t thought about starting with the mother of Charles Dumont. We tended to assume that researching female lines is harder than researching male lines. This is a reasonable assumption. In order to research a female line you must know the wife’s maiden name. We had been spending time researching English, Irish and Scottish lines and under British law a woman pretty much lost her identity when she got married. My dad had gotten (and still is) pretty frustrated with the Irish branches of the family. Even if you can figure out that Mary Murphy the wife of John Murphy (and do you KNOW how many John and Mary Murphys there are?) was originally, say, “Mary Ryan ” – how on earth were you going to figure out her father or mother when there were also thousands of Mary Ryans in the world. It isn’t impossible, but it is hard.

So we, I think, assumed that if the Canadian father of Charles Dumont was going to be hard to find, his mother would be even harder to find. There may have been other assumptions in here too. Maybe we assumed that she came from Canada too. And maybe we assumed that tracing the father’s line would lead to more interesting stories because men had always led more adventurous lives and certainly it would have been the man who made the decision to make that long journey overland from Canada to St. Charles, Missouri. (And why St. Charles? That had always bothered me. If you were going to come all the way to St. Charles, why not come a few miles further to St. Louis? Maybe because they were farmers and there was better land up near St. Charles? But if they were farmers why would they have lived in town?)

So my dad started looking at what he had been sent. According to the professional genealogist, Charles Dumont’s father “a Canadian, brought his family to Missouri about 1835 and settled in St. Charles. His wife was, apparently, deceased, and, within a few years, he married Marie Louisa Lebeau” and they had one son, Charles. “Brought his family” sounded so American. The great American migration – in covered wagons of course. At least that’s what I assumed when I read that. Based on census data, the genealogist stated that Dumont had five children who had come to St. Charles with him, so Charles Dumont would have had five half-siblings. The genealogist even gave the names of two of them based on 1850 census data: Florence and Anuranth Dumont.

My dad went out to the St. Louis County Library and talked to the research librarians and learned a lot about researching your Canadian ancestors. As I said, it turned out to be a lot easier than we thought and we wondered why we hadn’t started sooner. It all was made easier by the fine resources here for researching the French who came to Missouri from Canada. There are lots of St. Louis records of those people. The most important thing my dad discovered was that French women don’t lose their maiden names when they marry, they are still referred to by their maiden names in official records and even though the United States had taken over French territory the French custom of listing the mother’s maiden name had stuck among the French settlers. So tracing the female line was not going to be any harder than tracing the male line.

MISTAKEN ASSUMPTION NUMBER THREE: It is easy to assume that the name that is recorded on any official record is the right spelling or even the right name. Don’t assume that! Record keepers are human. They make mistakes. They hear things wrong. They sometimes have bad handwriting. They make assumptions that turn out false. They spell things the way THEY usually spell them. One of the biggest issues in St. Louis genealogical research is that the French who came to St. Louis were living under a Spanish regime and then an American regime. The Spanish tended to spell things in the Spanish way. “Jean Baptiste” might be recorded as “Juan Bautista”. Americans were even worse when it came to French spellings. And the priest at St. Charles Borromeo church in St. Charles originally came from Belgium and spelled things his own way. So you MUST be flexible in your thinking and search under what would ordinarily be “wrong” spellings.

Since the mother of Charles Dumont was a local St. Charles woman my dad started by looking for information about her. He found some deeds that she and her husband executed that named her as “Luisa”. Sometimes she is referred to as “Mary Louise” or just “Mary” or just “Louise”. But he did find her marriage records and her baptismal records and her gravesite. Her real name was Marie Louise LeBeau.

Eventually we discovered that her marriage to Charles Dumont’s father was, in fact, a second marriage. She had been widowed in her 20’s with two children – Florence and Amaranthe. It appears that the census taker in 1850 assumed that all the children were Dumonts because the French speaking mother was named Dumont when, in fact, only Charles was the Dumont. In fact, we’ve never found any indication that Charles Dumont’s father brought any children with him. We’re not even sure it is a good assumption that he was previously married. Note that the census taker had spelled Amaranthe incorrectly. And the records for Marie Louise’s first marriage had transcribed her first name incorrectly as Larisse instead of Louise (handwritten records are hard to read). But once we put two and two together, it all became clear.

Oh, and our assumption about the overland route with the wagons? Turns out nobody travelled by wagons in those days if they could help it. The roads, if they existed at all, were terrible. They travelled by river. Why would we, living here in this city at the confluence of two great rivers, have forgotten about river travel? Because nobody travels by river anymore except people moving grain and coal. And our history lessons told us that people came through St. Louis to travel west in wagons. Yes, they did – at a later date. It is a lesson to not just assume you know how people moved around. Think about it. Research it.

And Charles Dumont’s father, Thomas Dumont? His marriage record lists his parents’ name and the place they were from in Canada (although the spelling is so mangled it is hard to interpret their French names), so, yes, family lore was right. He was Canadian. But the more we look into him the more we think he did not come to St. Louis directly from his original home in Canada. We think he may have headed first to the Saskatchewan region, working the fur trade for a while. Then we think he came down through the Dakotas to Missouri, on the Missouri River. He may have been doing work for the American Fur Company which was based here and that’s how he ended up here. But that’s still a working hypothesis since the records are few.

When my dad found Marie Louise LeBeau’s baptismal record he confirmed her correct name and that she was born June 13, 1811, baptized at St. Charles Borromeo Church in St. Charles on July 31, 1811. And the baptismal record listed not only the name of her father, Baptiste Lebeau, but also the maiden name of her mother, Marguerite Barada, who turned out to have an interesting family history which I won’t go into here. We ended up going all the way back to the early 1600s on her line.

But what about Marie Louise’s father? What about his family?

MISTAKEN ASSUMPTION NUMBER FOUR: We bought into the narrative created by the professional genealogist. We thought it was based on facts or if it was based on assumptions they were reasonable.

Never assume that a narrative is completely true. It is always dangerous to create a narrative based on only a few facts. If you create a narrative make sure your facts are correct and if you are making assumptions you should state them.

In the genealogical summary sent to my dad, it stated that Baptiste Lebeau was Jean Baptiste LeBeau, the son of Jacques LeBeau and Marie Louise Jourdain from the Diocese of Quebec, and he “was an infant in 1780 when his family moved from Canada to Spanish Upper Louisiana. He grew up in St. Louis and subsequently settled in St. Charles where he married.” Later the narrative states that Jean Baptiste Lebeau was born about 1779 and still “not baptized, he was a babe in arms of his pregnant mother in late spring or early summer of 1780 when the family arrived in St. Louis. After Madame LeBeau gave birth to a baby girl, Marguerite, on June 19, 1780, both the newborn infant and Jean Baptiste were baptized by Father Bernard de Limpach, a Capuchin Friar, who was a parish priest of St. Louis, King of France, Catholic Church.”

Again, my dad and I had only our school histories to guide us and we had visions of wagons heading southwest from Canada carrying the LeBeau family to their new life in St. Louis. Why? Well because that’s what people did in those days, wasn’t it? They went west, always west. And in wagons. We still hadn’t figured out the whole river thing. And we certainly hadn’t yet figured out that fur traders, sometimes with their families, moved over vast distances on those rivers as on a regular basis. Voyageurs didn’t travel to a new town to settle in it. They travelled to trade. And often they went back and forth to towns over the course of many years. But of course we hadn’t yet figured out that we had Voyageurs in our family. We just assumed that, like the Americans who came later, the French Canadians were moving west to settle the land. We assumed, in fact, that the genealogist was correct that the LeBeau family had “moved” to St. Louis.

The narrative also went back to Jean Baptiste’s parents, which was where we got stuck. The father, Jacques LeBeau, was named, but not his parents. But the summary said that the mother, Marie Louise Jourdain, was the daughter of Francois Jourdain and Celeste Roussel. The marriage took place sometime about 1769 in the Diocese of Quebec. It said that Jacques was “born about 1740” and married “about 1769”. And it said: “Because there is no record of LeBeau’s death or burial in St. Louis’s Catholic Church records (nor any civil or military record), it must be presumed that Jacques died in Canada or on the long journey south.” The baptismal date of Jean Baptiste LeBeau is only three weeks after a British led Indian attack on St. Louis and if they were here before that date Jacques LeBeau surely would have been pressed into duty and there were no records of that. So, according to the genealogists narrative, the widow LeBeau arrived in St. Louis with her children, settled down and then, in 1790, married again to Michael Quesnel. Her children then moved to St. Charles when it was founded.

All of that sounded so exciting, if somewhat vague. Picture it. The LeBeau family making their way with pregnant Marie Louise holding little Jean Baptiste in the wagon, making their way toward St. Louis. Jacques dying along the way (how sad! and maybe it was death by Indians!) and the widow finding her way into St. Louis only to find the town in turmoil after the Indian attack. How frightening it must have been for her! And then after long years of widowhood she marries again.

It was a good narrative. But this was where things got interesting for my dad and me. Up until now the actual factual data we were sent had been correct and confirmable in the public records. There was a baptismal record for Jean Baptiste LeBeau and it did state that his parents were Jacques Lebeau and Marie Louis Jourdain. And it was the right date. But neither he nor I could find anything at all about Jacques Lebeau except references that had to do with his children. And neither he nor I could find confirmation that Marie Louise Jourdain was the child of Francois Jourdain and Celeste Roussel. There were Jourdains in St. Louis at the time by that name and we eventually concluded that the genealogist must have concluded that it was a good assumption that Marie-Louise Jourdain was related to the other Jourdains in the St. Louis area. But he didn’t state it as an assumption, he stated it as a fact.

Turns out that although it fit a narrative, it was a bad assumption. And the truth turned out to be far more interesting. My dad found the marriage contract of Marie Louise Jourdain and her second husband Michael Quesnel. (St. Louis was a big enough town that it had a notary to make actual contracts. If you are doing research you have to love the French and their contracts.) This contract lists the names of the bride’s parents as Jean Baptiste Jourdain and Marie Josephe Reaume. So the facts we were given were wrong. And the new facts we discovered changed the entire narrative.

The new information sent my dad and me off on a search for the Jourdains. We discovered that Jean Baptiste Jourdain had been born in Montreal, the son of a stone mason, but had moved to the area now known as Green Bay Wisconsin, where he became a trader and married Marie Josephe Reaume. He never went back to Montreal and he is listed among the first families to settle Green Bay. His wife was born somewhere in the Lake Michigan area and was the daughter of Jean Baptiste Reaume, the official French interpreter (and trader) at the post of Green Bay, and Symphorose Ouaouagoukoue, a Native American woman, who were legally married in the eyes of the church.

Well, that was interesting! And it made me rethink the whole theory of Marie Louise cowering in fear of Indians.

But although Marie Louise’s marriage contract lists her parents (and we assume it is correct because… why would she lie?) there was no record that those two persons had a daughter named Marie Louise. That was a bit of a mystery.

We discovered that Jean Baptiste Jourdain and Marie Josephe Reaume did have two daughters who were (confusingly) both named Marie Josephe after their mother but were known as Josette and Lysette. There was another daughter Madeleine. And there were references to a younger daughter named Angelique (who showed up later in St. Louis with her husband Augustin Roc). And references to a son named Jean Baptiste. But there was no Marie Louise.

Interestingly, however, in 1764 both Josette and Lysette Jourdain were married at Michilimackinac. Josette married a voyageur named Francois LeBlanc and Lisette married a voyageur named … Jean Baptiste LeBeau.

Now what are the odds, we thought? What are the odds that Jean Baptiste Jourdain and Marie Josephe Reaume had a daughter Lysette who married Jean Baptiste LeBeau, a voyageur, and also a daughter Marie Louise who married a Jacques LeBeau? Probably not good but also not impossible. Could they be the same person? Or is it just that her baptismal record is missing?

We’ve never resolved the question of whether Marie Louise is Lysette but that isn’t a road block. We know that, whether they are the same person or not, she is the daughter of Jean Baptiste Jourdain and Marie Josephe Reaume. So, from a genealogical perspective we could continue researching back from there, and we did. My dad and I took her family back two or three more generations to the point where her ancestors immigrated to Canada in the 1600’s. Unfortunately we were not able to find anything at all about her Indian grandmother, not even what tribe she belonged to. She remains a mystery to be solved.

And that leaves us with Jacques/Jean Baptiste LeBeau. We have no narrative for him, but we are continuing to work off the theory that they are the same person. While it is important not to create a narrative out of false assumptions, it is also important to have a working theory that states your assumptions and then to try to prove your assumptions true or false.

How did we decide this was a viable theory? First, by looking at the genealogist’s assumptions about Jacques LeBeau to see if we could challenge them. We were told he was “born about 1740”. We have no idea where that assumption came from. It probably seemed a logical age. It would have made Jacques about 40 years old when his children were being baptized. But what if he wasn’t born then? Could he have been older? At first I didn’t consider that, but then one day I asked myself why not? Why couldn’t he have been significantly older than Lysette? Maybe my mistake was to consider Lysette, who was three quarters French and one quarter Indian, to be a typical Frenchwoman. Maybe she was more like the Indian women of her grandmother’s people than Frenchwomen. Voyageurs were known to take young wives from among the Indians. They formed a working partnerships with these women who could do the hard work of preparing the skins for transport. Lysette would have been brought up in the fur trade, her father was a trader, her grandmother was an Indian. The Indians in Green Bay were a part of everyday life. They outnumbered the French. The entire settlement was built around the fur trade. Lysette had the opportunity to learn all the traditional skills. She would have been a good wife to a voyageur, no matter his age. This idea came to me when I ran across a reference to Francois LeBlanc with his “Indian” wife and I thought “well, either he had another wife or that was Josette.” And it occurred to me that there was no reason it couldn’t have been Josette.

Second, the genealogist states that Jacques was married “about 1769”. This was probably based on the age of his known children. Again, once I challenged that date (which had no documentation behind it) I realized there was no reason he couldn’t have been married earlier. Maybe their earliest children didn’t survive. Maybe they were baptized elsewhere or were never baptized. Maybe they didn’t have any children for a few years. The only children listed for them are Toussaint Jacques LeBeau (who is listed as 21 years old in 1792), Jean Baptiste LeBeau and Marguerite LeBeau. The genealogist assumed that their oldest child would have been born immediately after their wedding and that Toussaint was the first child they had. There is no reason either of those assumptions have to be true.

Third, we knew through documentary evidence that Marie-Louise didn’t marry Michael Quesnel until 1790 and we also know that, at that point, she and Michael Quesnel already had children. This was something the genealogist didn’t mention but it is a pretty important fact, Maybe he thought it would be embarrassing to document illegitimate children? But they are right there in the baptismal records. It was a fact in those days that children were often born out of marriage. For one thing, there weren’t always priests around when you needed them. You had to go into a town to find a priest.

Marie-Louise and Michael Quesnel were married in 1790, the same year that three of their children were baptized. That leads us to believe that she left St. Louis sometime after the baptisms in 1780 and she would have, of course, taken her LeBeau children with her. So maybe the genealogist was wrong and Jacques Lebeau wasn’t dead when his children were baptized. Maybe they had lived out among the Indians prior to that. Then, perhaps the turmoil of all the Indians being on the move for the Indian attack on St. Louis caused them to come into St. Louis after the attack. Heck, maybe they were with the Indians who were moving down to attack. Maybe they were a part of the attack? And then they decided that as long as they were there they would stop in at the church and have their children baptized and then move on again. All great narratives with no documentary evidence. But in any event Jacques LeBeau could have died before Louise showed up in St. Louis or after Louise showed up in St. Louis for the baptisms. There is no proof either way. The mere fact that there isn’t a death record for Jacques Lebeau in St. Louis doesn’t mean he didn’t die after that date. Especially not if they left St. Louis again.

And here is where modern assumptions got in the way for the genealogist. If a family came to St. Louis in 1780 then they must have come to settle there. That’s what we think. The idea that they might just come for a while and leave seems foreign to us. It doesn’t fit the narrative we learned in school. But the fact is that they could have left and gone out among the Indians again. People did that in those days.

We can assume that Jacques was dead before 1790 when Marie-Louise remarried. And we can assume he died a few years before that, the three Quesnel children baptized in 1790 point to that fact. But should we assume that he was dead in 1780? I’d say no. It doesn’t make sense that Marie Louise would have stayed “single” for almost 10 years after Jacques died. Or even for five years. That’s a modern concept, not how life was in those days. Almost all women remarried fairly quickly in those days. The marriage registers provide proof of this. So if Marie Louise was acting as most women of that time and place acted, there shouldn’t have been too long between the death of Jacques LeBeau and the appearance of Michael Quesnel in her life.

So, if our narrative is true, the genealogist was wrong and they did not “move” to St. Louis and their son Jean Baptiste LeBeau did not “grow up” in St. Louis. He grew up wherever his parents were and then wherever his mother and step-father were. Where were they? We don’t know. And trust me we’ve looked. We’ve looked for Lebeaus and for Quesnels.

And where, oh where, were Marie Louise Jourdain and Jacques Lebeau in the years between their possible marriage at Michilimackinac in 1764 and 1780 when their children were baptized in St. Louis? Again, we’ve looked. We found her brother in law, Augustin Roc, in Peoria during that time (presumably his wife Angelique Jourdain was with him) and there is even a reference to a Jean Baptiste Jourdain in Peoria in the early 1780s. That could be her father or her brother. But there is no evidence of the Lebeaus in Peoria.

So our current working theory consists of the bare minimum of this: Jacques and Marie Louise are the same people as the Jean Baptiste and Lysette who were married in 1764. We have no idea where they went after their marriage, where they lived or where he died, but we know they made a stop in St. Louis in 1780 to have two children baptized. And then later she came back to St. Louis with Michael Quesnel to have their children baptized and to get married. And the Quesnels either settled here or used it as a base to come and go.

That’s the theory. If anyone can prove or disprove any part of it or fill in the gaping holes in it, or come up with a better theory, let me know.

[Update: My dad reminds me that the census taker in 1850 not only spelled Amaranthe's name wrong but got the gender wrong too. Also, today I ran across a reference to a smallpox epidemic that raged up the Missouri River in 1781-82. I wonder if that is what might have killed Jacques LeBeau. The timing might work out with the births of the Quesnel children. ]

Who Is Jean Baptiste LeBeau?

This will be of no interest to most of my readers, but what else is a personal blog for if not to throw out a question to the world and wait for the long tail to drag in an answer.

Who was Jean Baptiste LeBeau?

In 1764, at the Mission of St. Ignace at Michilimackinac (in present day Michigan ), there was a double wedding of two sisters:

July 24, 1764, I received the mutual marriage consent of jean Baptiste le Beau, voyageur; and marie joseph, called lysette jourdin, after the three publications of Bans.

On the same day I received the mutual marriage consent of francois le Blanc, voyageur; and of marie joseph, called josette jourdin after the three publications of bans. P. DU JAUNAY, miss. of the society of Jesus. Francois le Blanc, + his mark; Baptiste Le Beau; Langlade; Laurent Ducharme; Cardin; Jean Baptiste Jourdain, + his mark, father of the brides.

Who was this Jean Baptiste Le Beau who married Lysette Jourdain in 1764? From the wedding register we know nothing about him except that he was a voyageur and he could sign his name (unlike the other groom and the father of the brides). He is a mystery that I would like to solve.

We know a fair amount about Lysette Jourdain although we don’t know her age because, confusingly, she and her sister were baptized with the same name. The first Marie Josephe Jourdain was born in 1747 the year after her parents were married at St. Ignace:

1746, I received the mutual [marriage] consent of B. Jourdain, son of guillaume [Jourdain and of] Angelique la Reine} and _______ Reaume, daughter of J.B. Reaume, residing at la Baye … P. DU JAUNAY, miss. of the Society of Jesus. Louis Pascale Chevalier.

June 20, 1747, I solemnly baptized (S.C.) marie joseph, legitimate daughter of jean baptiste jourdain and of josephe Reaume, residing at La Baye, the child having been born at la baye in the month of April last. The godfather was Mr. de Noyel, the younger, commandant of this post; and the godmother Mlle Bourassa, wife of Mr Bourassa, the elder, who signed here with me. P. DU JAUNAY, miss. of the society of Jesus. Noyelle, fils; Marie La Plente Bourassa.

Residing at “La Baye” meant that they were living at the French settlement at what is now Green Bay Wisconsin. The second Marie Josephe Jourdain was baptised in 1756 along with a sister and two cousins:

July 19, 1756, I, the undersigned priest, missionary of the society of jesus, supplied the ceremonies and baptized conditionally, jean Simon personne, son of Charles personne and of Suzanne Reaume, his father and mother; and hubert personne, son of the same above mentioned; marie joseph, daughter of jean Baptiste jourdain and marie joseph Reaume, her father and mother, and Marie magdelaine, daughter of the same – the first boy, six years old, born on the fourteenth of April, 1750; the second born on the 1st of December, 1753; the first girl born on the tenth of October, 1751, the second on the 25th of january 1754. The godfather of the first boy was jean le febvre; and the godmother marie josette farley; the godfather of the second boy was Mr Couterot, Lieutenant of infantry; and the godmother Charlotte Bourassa; the godfather of the first girl was jean Baptiste le tellier; and the godmother Marie Anne Amiot; the gofather of the second girl was Antoine janis; and the godmother Marie Angelique Taro. M. L. LEFRANC, miss. of the society of Jesus. H. COUTEROT; BOURASSA LANGLADE; JEAN LE FAIBRE; JOSETTE FARLY; JEAN TELLIER; ANTOINE JANISE; MARI ANGELIQUE TARO

In between a brother, Jean Baptiste, born in November 1748, was baptized. Then in 1760 another sister, Angelique, born in February 1759, was baptized.

Which of the Marie Josephe Jourdains was Lysette and which was Josette? We’ll never know. But on their marriage day one was 17 years old and the other was only 12 1/2 years old. Three years later, on February 9, 1768, her sister Magdeleine, was contracted to marry Jean Saliot in Detroit. She was 14 years old. There is no existing record of when Angelique Jourdain married her husband, Augustin Roc.

But who is Jean Baptiste Le Beau? Where did he come from and where did he and Lysette go after they were married?

1764 was a year of transition for the French in the Wisconsin/Michigan area. France had lost the Seven Years War and had ceded all of its territory east of the Mississippi River to Britain. The British were beginning to move into the territory and the French traders were seeing their livelihood dry up. Earlier in the same month of Lysette’s marriage, a deposition was given by Garrit Roseboom, Tunis Fischer, Cummin Schields and Wm. Bruce, merchants from La Bay “before a Court of Enquiry at the Detroit the 4th day of July 1764”.

Garrit Roseboom declares that about the latter end of April, 1763, he was going from the Bay to the Soaks [Sac Indians] to look for his Partnr Abrah Lancing who had been up there [with the Sac], being told that he was killed, that on his way he met some Indains coming down with some Packs [of furs], which he knew to be his, and which they said he might have for paying the carriage; That both the French and Indians told him Mr. Lancing and his son were killed by two Frenchmen, Tibot [Thibaut] and Cardinal, both servts. of Mr. Lancing, who, they had been told, upon the above Murder made their escape to the Illinois [the country south of Prairie du Chien along the Mississippi River]; that on his return to the Bay he found Mr. Garrit and the Garrison there, and came with them to Michilimackinac, leaving his goods in possession of one Jordan, a Frenchman and an Inhabitant at the Bay; that when he returned from Michilimackinac with the Indians to La Bay, he found some of his goods taken away he thinks of his and Mr. Fischer’s to the value of 20 pounds, wh. he [Jourdain] said was stolen by the Indians, but Mr. Roseboom declares he saw his goods wore by Jordan’s Family afterwards.

That was almost certainly Lysette’s father who was accused of taking Mr. Roseboom’s goods. Of course in a “he said/he said” situation it’s hard to know what happened and it doesn’t appear that the testimony of Mr. Jourdain was sought. But stolen goods might have been the least of his problems. Mr. Roseboom continued his deposition:

That the Indians told him that the French at the Bay … had told them there was an open war between the English and French; That the French would send the Indians ammunition enough & if they went down amongst the English they [the English] would put poison in their [the Indians] Rum, which he [Roseboom] was sure prevented the Indians from coming down [to trade] much sooner, [Roseboom] declares from the treatment He and the rest of the English Traders received, and the lyes propogated by the French at LaBay, among the Indians … he thinks these Inhabitants [of La Baye] were Very bad subjects …

So the new British overlords were hearing from Mr. Jourdain’s new competitors that Mr. Jourdain was a Very Bad Subject. The remainder of the deposition continues with the things that the English Traders heard from the Indians which was all mostly wishful thinking on the part of the French and the Indians that the French govt. would return.

But the deposition of William Bruce also refers to a LeBeau who must be the same LeBeau who married Lysette Jourdain:

That about the latter end of Sept. a Chief of the [Saks Indians] had brought him up [a river] called the [Wisconsin] and at the Renards Castle [the encampment of the Fox Indians], an Indian told him that he was come from la Bay with a letter from Goalie, the Interpreter, to one Le Beaue [sic] telling him that there were officers from France who had come with a large Fleet commanded by the Dauphin, etc., and that the Governor of Quebec had offered these officers a Purse of Money for their News, that soon after the Fleet was seen, and that Quebec and Montreal would soon be taken, being no more than 500 men in Each, which news immediately spread among the Indians, who were there at the time in great numbers; that the Sauteurs, Ottawas, Renards and Puants gave a Good Deal of Credit to it … but that the [Saks] and the Folloeavoines could not believe it; that at the [Saks] Castle, the Indians told him, the Deponent, that the French there intended to kill him, on which they called a council and brought the French to it, and told them if they killed the Englishman every Frenchman should die with Him, this had been told to [the deponant] by the Indians to whom the French had discovered their intentions; the Names of the French on the above Voyage up to the Wisconsin were Martoc [Jean Baptiste Marcot?], Jordan & Labeau , Rivier, St. Pier, Mon. Fontasie, Havness, Lafortain, the three first discovering all the marks of bad subjects and disaffection to the English in their whole behaviour; That he hear’d St. Pier say that if he had wrote such a letter as the Interpreter wrote to Labeau, he wo’d expect to be hanged if ever he went among the English.

Tensions were high at this time because in the summer of 1763 the Indians around Michilimackinac attacked the English, sparing the French. Given the political situation, and given that Jourdain was being tagged as a “bad subject” who showed “disaffection to the English” in his behaviour, maybe he thought he ought to start getting his daughters married because he might not be getting much in the way of trade goods in the future.

But who was the man he chose to marry Lysette?

Although there were many LeBeaus in the Detroit region, there were not many references to LeBeau in the Wisconsin, Northern Michigan area. In 1736, among the boatmen contracted for that year were “Baptiste Lebeau, Antoine Giguaire, Louis Marcheteau to the Sioux”. That same year a new Company of the Sioux had been formed to trade with the Sioux (west of the Mississippi in present day Iowa and Minnesota) and some of the traders licensed through that company were members of the Giguere family. This leads me to believe that the boatman, Baptiste LeBeau, might be the son of the Jean Baptiste Lebeau who married Marguerite Giguere. Their son, Jean Baptiste LeBeau, was born in 1705 which would make him 31 years old in 1736.

But he may have been in the area earlier. In the early 1730’s there is a reference to a Lebeau in a report made to the Canadian government regarding the exploration of some copper mines in the Lake Superior area:

The said Corbin left Sault Ste. Marie … with two men named Vaudry and Le Beau who were going to meet the Sieur de la Ronde’s son. The latter was returning after spending the winter at Chagouamigon. He embarked with Them and they were followed by two others named feli and Gobin. They took on board a savage at the place called The cove (L’anse") near the point of Kienon, who asserted that he had thorough knowledge of the mines and of the Copper in the said River of Tonnagane. They travel led thither, and after entering the said River, which they ascended for a distance of about 8 leagues from the shore of lake Superior, they found a mine about 15 arpents in length ascending the river, 30 feet from the water’s edge and which may be at a height of 60 feet in the cliff.

There is no indication of the first name of this “Le Beau”.

Jean Baptiste LeBeau is never a godfather (or a father, for that matter) at any of the baptisms at St. Ignace, but he was a witness at the 1747 marriage of Lysette Jourdain’s aunt, Suzanne Reaume, to Charles Person de la Fond. This seems to indicate a lasting relationship with the Reaume/Jourdain family. The only other church record that lists a LeBeua is on July 23, 1786, there is a Bte. Labeau listed as a churchwarden of the church of Ste. Anne de Michilimackinac. This seems unlikely to be the same Jean Baptiste Lebeau since he never showed any interest in the church before this, although at this point if it is the same man he would have been 81 years old and maybe the church appealed to him. More likely it is not him.

Of course if Jean Baptiste LeBeau, voyageur, was born in 1705, he would have been close to 60 when he married Lysette. This isn’t outside the realm of possibility but it does give one pause. So maybe that isn’t who Jean Baptiste LeBeau is. Or maybe it is his son – perhaps through a relationship with a Native American woman and the son was never baptised at St. Ignace. Or maybe he is just someone else. But I’ve been through all the possible Jean Baptiste Lebeaus and can’t pin anyone else down unless their wives died early or they were also bigamists. (This would be a real possibility in later fur trade years but less so in the 1700s – and why risk getting married in the church if you were committing bigamy? The Jesuits were big blabbermouths and wrote a lot of letters.)

In the list of Licenses granted for Michilimackinac and places beyond in 1778, the trader “J.B. LeBeau” is licensed to take two (2) canoes to the “Illenois” with Fuzees, gunpowder, shot and ball. This is interesting to me because two years later, in the summer of 1780, there was an attack on the town of St. Louis which was located outside of British territory on the Spanish side of the Mississippi River. And immediately after the attack a woman named Marie Louise Jourdain showed up in St. Louis to have two children baptized. The first was her son, Jean Baptiste LeBeau, who must have been a few years old already, and the second was a daughter named Marguerite who was a newborn. The father is listed as “Jacques LeBeau”.

What is the connection you may ask? In 1790 Marie Louise Jourdain married for the second time to Michael Quesnel and her marriage contract lists her parents as Jean Baptiste Jourdain and Marie Josephe Reaume. In 1800 she died and her age is listed as “about” 50. So the immediate question is whether this was a Jourdain daughter who was never baptized and who happened to marry a man named Jacques LeBeau who may or may not have been related to the husband of her sister Lysette? Or is this really Lysette using the name Louise. I’ve found numerous examples of French men and women using names different than their baptismal names, so it seems a real possibility that this is Lysette and that Jacques Lebeau is really Jean Baptiste LeBeau.

In any event, whether she is or isn’t Lysette, she is the daughter of the Jourdains. There is no reason she would have lied in her marriage contract. And Augustin Roc, the husband of Angelique Jourdain, is a fixture in the lives of her children (witnessing weddings, attending burials, etc.).

But who is Jacques LeBeau? If the name Jean Baptiste LeBeau leads to few places in the Green Bay/Michilimackinac area, the name Jacques LeBeau leads nowhere. There are a couple of men named Jacques Lebeau in other places but the facts just don’t match up. (And to add confusion there is one reference to her husband being Francois LeBeau.)

The St. Louis LeBeaus had three living children (that we know of): Toussaint Jacques LeBeau (who was about 21 in 1790 and who married Marie LaFernai or LaFernay), Jean Baptiste LeBeau (who married Marguerite Barada), and Marguerite Lebeau (who married a man named Etienne Bernard but died in childbirth a year later). If Jacques is the Jean Baptiste LeBeau who was the son of Marguerite Giguere, he may have wanted his daughter named after his mother. It’s a thought.

The reason I’m interested is that I’m descended from Jean Baptiste LeBeau and Marguerite Barada. And my dad and I have been looking for Jacques/Jean Baptiste Lebeau for years.

By the way, the reason I don’t think that the LaBeau who was a churchwarden in Michilimackinac in 1786 is the LeBeau I’m looking for has nothing to do with the St. Louis connection. I am fairly sure that the LeBeau family showed up in St. Louis after the Indian attack, had the baptisms performed and then left again. Why? Bechttp://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=1974275832677042000&postID=1333076643983233155ause when Marie Louse Jourdain remarried in 1790 she also had three children baptized at the same time – Joseph, Susanne and Etienne, all the children of Michael Quesnel, her new husband. So they were clearly not in St. Louis during those years. And then their daughter Angelique was born a few months later, so the bride was pregnant. But if the LaBeau who was in Michilimackinac in 1786 was the husband of Lysette, and if Lysette really was Marie Louise – she was cheating on him.

Anybody who has any helpful information please leave a comment or feel free to email me.

[Update August 14, 2010: In response to comments I've been looking through some of my information and want to confirm exactly what I have on Jacques/Jean Baptiste LeBeau and realized that the baptism records make it even more likely Jacques/Jean Baptiste are the same but show how confused the naming is:

The index to the baptism at the Old Cathedral in St. Louis shows that on June 19, 1780 were baptised Jean Baptiste "LeVeau" and Margaret "LeVeau" children of Baptiste "LeVeau" and Marie Jourdain.

There is no death record for Lebeau.

The transcription of the marriage contract for the second marriage of "Marie Louise" Jourdain to Michel Quesnel in 1790, lists her as the widow of "Francois LeBeau" and the daughter of Jean Baptiste Jourdain, deceased, and Marie Joseph "Reamme" (Reaume). Present was her brother in law Augustine "Roe" (Roc or Roch or Roque- transcribers often get his name wrong and he couldn't sign his own name) and Etienne Bernard, her son-in-law.

In the baptismal records of the Old Cathedral of St. Louis are records of "Guinel" children of Michel "Guinel" and Marie Louise Jourdain all baptised on July 1, 1790: Joseph, Susanne and etienne. Then Angelique is baptised October 19, 1790 (Marie Louise was pregnant when she and Michel arrived back in St. Louis.) Later there is an August listed with the same parents but not baptised until May 3, 1837 - this is either an error (since the parents were long dead) or he had never been baptised as a child and was baptised as an adult. On January 27, 1796 their daughter Emilie was born and was not baptised until May 1, 1796 at St. Charles Borromeo (so they may have left between 1790 and 1796).

The transcribed copy of the marriage contract, in 1795, of Toussaint Jacques LeBeau and Marie LaFrenais doesn't list any parents for either of them but lists those present for the groom as: Augustin Roch, his uncle, Pierre Quesnel, L. Chevalier, cousin" (the Chevaliers are related to the Jourdains through the Reaume mothers).

O.W. Collet's index to St. Charles Marriage Register lists the marriage on February 4, 1800 of Jean Baptiste LeBeau, son of "Jacques" Lebeau and Louise Jourdain now wife of MIch. Quesnel, to Margt. Barada daughter of Louis Barada and Marie Becquet.

The records of St. Charles Borromeo Church show the baptism of Marguerite LeBeau, daughter of Jean Baptiste LeBeau and Marguerite Barada on December 18, 1800 with godparents Toussaint LeBeau "uncle of child" and Marie Bequet.

Marie Louise Jourdain, wife of Michel "Quenelle" died October 3, 1802 and was buried at St. Charles Borromeo Church "age about 50 years". Michel "Quenel" died January 1, 1816 "husband of the deceased Marie Louise Jourdain" and was buried in St. Charles Borromeo.

I do the Bechdel Test for Movies this Weekend

Next time you go to a movie ask these three questions:

1.  Are there two or more women characters in the movie who have names?

2.  Do they talk to each other?

3.  Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?

So, over the 4th of July Weekend I went to the movies.  On Saturday I went to see Winter’s Bone, the story of 17 year old Ree Dolly, a Missouri Ozarks girl trying to find her meth cooking, out-on-bond, missing dad who put the family cabin and land up to secure his bail bond.  There were multiple women in the movie who all had names and who talked to each other.   At first I wondered if the film would fail the Bechdel Test though because, although Ree had lots of conversations with other women, they were mostly about Ree’s dad or Milton, the scary backwoods male head of one of the many branches of Ree’s Ozarks family. 

Ree’s mom doesn’t talk (she had some kind of mental breakdown).  Ree’s conversations with her Ozarks women kin are about her dad or Milton.  Her conversation with her dad’s former “lady friend” April is all about her dad.  Ree does talk to the neighbor, Sonya, about taking care of their horse because she can’t feed it anymore and Sonya gives Ree some pain pills when Ree has been beat up.  And Ree and her best friend Gail do talk about what Ree is going to do with her little brother and sister – whether she needs to give them up to other people to raise.  Those conversations aren’t about a man.  But they are necessitated by the actions of a man – Ree’s dad.  

The film was written and directed by Debra Granik and it won best picture at Sundance.  It’s an odd story in which women are, simultaneously, under the thumb of abusive men and yet stronger than the men.  They enable the abusiveness of the men in many ways and yet go behind their backs to do what they think needs to be done. It is the women who decide to end Ree’s problem and tell her what she needs to know to save her homestead. 

As a movie, I think it is really well done and I really recommend it.  Go to see it.  It will provoke good conversation.  And it will also explain to you why I sometimes want to escape this State of Missouri.   At the end of the movie I said, “they either really did film that in the Ozarks or they found a place that looks exactly like it”.  I watched all the credits.  They really did film it here in Missouri.  In Christian County and Taney County in Southwest Missouri right down by the Arkansas border.  But you don’t have to go to the Ozarks to find insularity and people cooking meth.  You can go to Franklin County, right outside St. Louis, and be scared out of your wits.  And while insularity may be at its peak in the Ozarks, but you’ll find it all over this State.  In many ways this is one scary State. Ironically it is the cities that get the bad rap when it is rural Missouri that no one in their right mind would want to have their car break down in.

I also saw Toy Story III.  In 3D.  My first 3D movie.  What a waste of money.  Not the movie, which was quite cute.  But to pay double the price to see it in 3D.   It would have been perfectly fine in 2D.   The movie failed the Bechdel Test. It had women characters with names:  Mrs. Potato Head, Jessie (the cowgirl), Barbie (yes, THAT Barbie) and Dolly (yes, just Dolly).   And they didn’t only talk about men, they spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to escape the daycare center to which they had been donated (and get back to Andy but they would have wanted to escape even if Andy wasn’t an option). But as far as I can remember they didn’t talk to each other.   Which leads me to wonder why it is necessary that two women characters talk to EACH OTHER in order for there to be a female presence in the film.  Why?   I’m still pondering that.   

Happy Independence Day

Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence? If not, you should. It’s a fine piece of writing. The beginning and the end are poetry. But what’s with the middle? All those “he has” sentences. An enumeration of all the terrible things King George did to the colonists to justify their decision to break with Great Britain. And some of them seem to have been written in code.

“For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies”

For all of you living in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio – this part is for you. Yes, your state was an enumerated reason for the 13 colonies to break with Great Britain. It was all because YOU were included within the 14th colony. What? What 14th colony? Quebec of course. Britain defeated France in the Seven Years war and France ceded all of its land east of the Mississippi (except New Orleans) to Britain. Quebec became a part of Great Britain.

But what to do with it? It was full of people. And they all spoke French! And they were all Catholic and they had NO interest in taking an oath of allegiance that referenced protestantism. And they had their own way of doing things including an entire system of contractual rights through which they ran their fur trade.

Hence, the Quebec Act. In 1774 parliament finally got around to passing an act for the administration of all that land that France ceded them. They replaced the oath of allegiance with one that didn’t mention protestantism. They guaranteed the Quebecois the free practice of their Catholic faith. They kept English common law for government matters and criminal matters but restored the French civil law to private matters (i.e. contracts etc.).

And while they were at it, Britain threw all the rest of French North America under the administration of Quebec and put it under the same rules. That’s where Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio come in.

The 13 colonies were furious about this. They called the Quebec Act one of the Intolerable Acts. People in the Ohio Country were free to be Catholic? OMG. That Royal Proclamation of 1763 in which Britain recognized the right of the Indians to the land? They had to be bound by that? And the Virginia and Pennsylvania land companies couldn’t freely drive the Indians out because the Indians “belonged” to Quebec? Are you kidding? Is THAT the American way? What if that happened all over the 13 colonies? What a terrible proposition. Catholics everywhere! And Indians with land rights! And all of our dreams of profiting from the land beyond the mountains dashed. It must be stopped!

You can see why the 13 colonies were compelled to rebel. Right?

So Happy Independence Day to everyone. Go out and live the American Dream, especially you in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio (oh, and Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota, which were also French).