♂Charles Tougas

Charles Tougas was a man of the parish of Fatouville, in Normandy, whom the parish register names in 1673 as the father of Raulin Tougar at his marriage. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Guillaume Tougas (1648–1677).

Origins

His parents are not known. Family trees give his birth as 1628 in Upper Normandy, but no record of it has been found, and the year fits poorly with the rest of his life. A genealogical file of French emigrants to Canada, compiled for his grandson Guillaume, lists Charles Tougard and Francoise Deshaies as married about 1630, and his son Raulin was said to be forty-five to fifty years old when he was buried in 1685. Neither his baptism nor his marriage can be checked at Fatouville, because the surviving parish register there begins only in 1664.

Marriage and children

The same file names five children: Raulin, Guillaume, Thomas, Jean and Marie. The first parish record to name Charles and his wife together is Raulin’s marriage to Marie Helot at Fatouville on Sunday 15 October 1673, where the register calls the groom the son of Charles and of “Françoise Deshayes”; among the witnesses were a Jacques Tougard and a Guillaume Tougard. The act does not describe Charles as deceased. Raulin died at Fatouville on 27 August 1685, having received the sacraments, and was buried in the churchyard the next day. Guillaume, through whom the line descends, and his wife Marie Labbe had a son Guillaume baptized at Fatouville in August 1674, who later went to Canada as a soldier.

Notes

On 26 January 1671 the Fatouville register records the baptism of Charlotte, daughter of Charles Tougard and Marie Labbesse, and on the following day her burial, aged twenty-four hours, in the presence of Charles Tougard her father. The records do not show whether this was Charles, married again after the death of Francoise Deshaies, or a slip of the priest’s for his son Guillaume, whose wife was Marie Labbe and whose other children were being baptized in the parish in the same years.

The family record once carried a marriage at La Prairie, in Canada, on 18 May 1733 as his own. It belonged to his great-grandson and namesake, Charles Tougas dit Laviolette, born about 1706, a son of Guillaume Tougas and Marie Brazeau, as Cyprien Tanguay’s genealogical dictionary shows.

Death

Family trees give Charles’s death as 1680 at Fatouville. The parish register holds no burial for him in that year, and an old alphabetical name table of the register for 1664 to 1693 lists no burial of a Charles Tougard at all. The register has gaps, among them most of 1681 and all of 1684, so when and where he died is not known.