♀Eleanor Tougas Lovellette

Eleanor Tougas Lovellette (3 November 1830 – 22 October 1898) was a woman of the French settler family of Wabash County, Illinois, and the wife of the Mount Carmel physician James Harvey. A family narrative preserves the letter in which he proposed to her in December 1848; it asked her to sign her name on the letter and send it back if she accepted, and the copy shows her answer written in: “E. Lovelette.” She was the great-great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Julia Esther Harvey (1857–1951), Julia’s daughter Mabel Wilkinson (1875–1954) and Mabel’s daughter Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968).

Early life

She was born on 3 November 1830 on the Old Blunt Farm in Wabash County, the eldest child of Augustin Tougas Lovellette (1809–1866) and Julia Adele Laplante (1811–1861), who had married at St. Francis Xavier church in Vincennes, Indiana, that January. She was baptized Eleonore on 27 March 1831 at Vincennes, Indiana, across the Wabash River, and she was reared there; two brothers, Jean Baptiste and Guillaume Augustin, were baptized there in 1833 and 1835.

Her family were the Tougas dit Laviolette, French Canadians who had come to Vincennes in the 1770s. A county history published in 1883 names the Tougas family, “also named Lavulette”, as prominent among the few French families who first settled near Rochester about 1800. A local history of the old Rochester cemetery explains the two surnames: of her grandfather Augustus’s brothers, those who settled around St. Francisville kept the name Tougas, while those who settled around Rochester, her grandfather among them, used Lovellette. Her own name appears in the records in both forms and in several spellings of each, and the censuses call her Ellen.

Marriage and family

James Harvey’s letter of proposal is dated at Rochester on 10 December 1848 and addressed “To Miss E. Lovelette”. They married on 7 February 1849 in Coffee Precinct, Wabash County. In 1850 they were living in the Wabash precinct of the county, and by 1860 at Mount Carmel, where he practised medicine; the census finds her there again in 1870, keeping house, and in 1880. The couple had seven children, born between 1850 and 1870, and all seven are named, with their married names and towns, in the obituary of the youngest, Orian Ross Harvey, in 1908.

Death

Her husband died in December 1896. She made a will on 16 March 1897; the family narrative records that an empty envelope marked “Ellen Harveys will March 16th, 1897” was kept in the family; the will itself has not been found. She died on Saturday, 22 October 1898, at the family home at the corner of Second and Walnut streets in Mount Carmel, aged 67. The funeral was held on Monday afternoon, 24 October, at the Methodist Episcopal Church^W, of which she had been a member for 47 years; she had joined the congregation at Rochester in 1851. She was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, Mount Carmel, and shares her husband’s gravestone, which reads “Eleonore, his wife, Nov. 3, 1830 – Oct. 22, 1898”.

All seven of her children outlived her. Beauchamp Augustus, Mary Alice (Mrs. J. Fred Stein), Julia Esther (Mrs. R. T. Wilkinson) and Laura lived at Mount Carmel; James William and Ella May (Mrs. White) lived at Springfield; and Orian Ross lived in Coffee precinct, the district around Rochester. Her brother John Lovellette and three of her sisters also survived her: Mary J. Legier, Mrs. Marshall Legier (her sister Julia Adelia) and Mrs. Aubrey Nash.

Notes

The same family narrative suggests that she had first married Charles Lacosse, also called Languedoc, at St. Francis Xavier church in Vincennes on 7 August 1848, four months before the proposal letter. The Lacosse couple, however, had children baptized at Vincennes in 1849 and 1851 and another born about 1856, in the same years as the Harvey children, so one woman cannot have been the mother of both families. Her own obituary names her parents as Augustin Tougas and Julia La Plante and gives her marriage to James Harvey as 7 February 1849, and the gravestone’s birth date matches her 1830 baptism. The Lacosse bride was another Eleonore Tougas, whose parentage is not yet established.

The account of her death rests on her obituary, “Gone to Her Reward”, in the Mt. Carmel Republican of 28 October 1898, page 4, which also gives her age as 67 years, 11 months and 19 days and her birthplace as the old Blunt farm. Her son’s necrology in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, volume 20, number 4 (January 1928), pages 624–625, says she was reared at Vincennes. It writes her father’s name and her grandfather’s as Augustus where the obituary gives Augustin, most likely the English form of the same name.