♀Elisabeth Miami

Elisabeth Miami (dates unknown) was a Miami^W woman who in April 1693, at Chicago, became the first wife of the French officer and explorer Pierre You Sieur de la Découverte (1658–1718). She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Marie-Anne You de la Couverte (1694–1766).

The union with Pierre You

Her union with Pierre You was not a church marriage. Tanguay gives it no date or parish, although he heads every other marriage on the same page with both, and when Pierre You married Madeleine Just at Montreal on 19 April 1697, the register described him as single. In New France only a marriage performed by a priest had standing, so in the eyes of the Montreal parish he had never been married. No record states where Elisabeth was then, or whether she was still living. Family trees give her birth as 1669, in a Miami village of the Wea^W (Oui) band, but no record confirms the year or the band. No record of her parents or of her death has been found.

Notes

Two records once credited to her concern other people. The burial of an Elisabeth “sauvagesse” at La Prairie on 25 February 1718 is that of a baptized girl of about eight or nine, and the baptism of an Elisabeth “sauvagesse” at St. Louis on 10 June 1784 is that of a child of five. An online tree index also confuses her with Pierre You’s second wife, Madeleine Just, a native of Brèves in Burgundy.

Records and name

She is known from very few records, and none gives her a family name. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography^W describes Pierre You’s first wife as “an Indian woman of the Miami tribe, named Elisabeth”, taken at Chicago in April 1693, and the mother of a daughter baptized Marie-Anne. Cyprien Tanguay’s^W dictionary of French-Canadian families, compiled in the late nineteenth century, lists her only as “Sauvagesse, Elisabeth, miami”, with no dates, parents or parish. The register of her daughter’s marriage at Notre-Dame in Montreal on 15 August 1718, as read in a modern index of the Quebec parish registers, names the bride’s parents as Pierre You and “Elisabeth”, whose origin it gives as “sauvagesse Miami”, and calls the bride herself “sauvagesse”. Sauvagesse was the French colonial word for a Native woman, and Miami was the name of her nation. Neither is a family name: the “Miami” under which she is known is a description that later compilers indexed as a surname.