♀Agnes Richard Dit Lafleur

Agnes Richard Dit Lafleur (7 May 1719 – before 24 July 1778) was a woman of French and Wea descent who grew up at the French post of Ouiatenon on the Wabash River and spent her adult life there and at Post Vincennes, where she was twice married and gave birth to a daughter seven weeks after her second wedding. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son François Godere (1740–1780).

Early life

She was born on 7 May 1719 at Pointe-aux-Trembles, on Montreal Island, the daughter of Jean Baptiste Richard dit Lafleur, a blacksmith and interpreter, and of Marie-Anne You de la Couverte, the daughter of the explorer Pierre You and a Miami woman. Her parents had married at Montreal the year before. On 3 September 1722 the governor gave her father leave to take his wife and their three children back to Ouiatenon by canoe, and she was raised at the post, among her mother’s people.

First marriage

About 1735, at about sixteen, she married Francois Emery dit Codere at Ouiatenon. Several of their children were born there, and the Vincennes register later describes their sons as born at Ouiatenon. In December 1750 a daughter, Agnes, about a year old, drowned in the Wabash fifteen leagues from Vincennes; her body was carried down to the post and buried in the church near the sanctuary, the register noting that her parents were then living at Ouiatenon. Her sons René, Pierre, François and Louis and her daughter Marie Joseph all later married at Vincennes, and in their marriage acts she is named, as the clerks wrote it, “Agnes Richard” or “agnesse richard”, the wife of François Gauder, Goder or Godere. Her husband had died by the summer of 1756.

Vincennes

On 28 August 1756 she married John Baptist Vaudry at Post Vincennes. The register calls the groom Jean Baptiste Vaudry, of the parish of Sainte-Anne of Detroit, son of Joseph Vaudry and Marie Le Page, and names the bride by her parents, as the daughter of Richard and “Marianne Le Decouverte”, without mention of her first husband. Only one of the three banns was published; the other two were dispensed. A daughter, Marie, was born on 17 October 1756, seven weeks after the wedding, and baptized on 7 November as the child of a lawful marriage. The records do not explain the timing. Two more children of the marriage were baptized at Vincennes: Ursule in April 1759 and Jean Baptiste in February 1761, when she was forty-one.

In May 1759 she stood godmother to Louise Agnesse, an enslaved child belonging to the widow Perthuis, and signed the entry with her mark, a cross. The Vaudry household itself held enslaved people: in January 1774 Marie Louise, the daughter of Etienne and Marie Louise, a couple described as slaves belonging to Jean Baptiste Vaudry, was baptized at Vincennes.

She died at Vincennes before 24 July 1778, when the banns for her daughter Ursule’s marriage describe her as deceased.

Notes

The family record gives her death as 12 July 1779 at Vincennes. The banns for her daughter Ursule Vaudry’s marriage to Pierre Gamelin, published by the priest Pierre Gibault and dated 24 July 1778 in the printed edition of the register, already describe her as “deceased”, so she died before that date.