♂François Eloy

François Eloy (died before 4 January 1742), known as St. François, was a colonist from Versailles who married at New Orleans in 1730 and whose family settled at Fort de Chartres^W in the Illinois Country^W. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Francoise Eloi. On 4 January 1742 three acts were drawn up together at Fort de Chartres: the inventory of François Eloy’s estate, the marriage contract of his widow and François Paboeuf, and the naming of guardians for his children. Under the Custom of Paris^W, the law of the colony, the inventory closed out the property a couple had held in common, so that the children’s inheritance from their father was settled before their mother married again.

Marriage and family

On 30 October 1730 François Eloy, a native of Versailles, married Marie Barbe Colin, a native of the diocese of Cornouaille in Brittany, in the parish church of St. Louis at New Orleans; their witnesses were a corporal and three soldiers. The couple had two daughters, Marie Barbe, baptized at New Orleans on 13 May 1731, and Francoise. The family later moved up the Mississippi to the Illinois Country, and François was dead by 4 January 1742, leaving Barbe and the children at Fort de Chartres. A historian of the colony, Winstanley Briggs, later called him “the solid habitant Francois Eloy ‘St. Francois’”; a habitant was a settler who held land.

Notes

His name

His marriage entry of 1730, as printed in Earl C. Woods and Charles E. Nolan’s Sacramental Records of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, files him under the surname Paris, as “Francois Eloy, surnamed ST. FRANCOIS”, the son of François and an unnamed mother; the bride’s entry calls him “Francois Eloy PARIS, surnamed ST. FRANCOIS”. The notarial acts of the Illinois Country call him François Eloy dit St. François and never Paris, and both daughters carried Eloy as their surname. The records do not explain the difference.

The acts of 1742

The inventory of “the late Saint Francois”, the marriage contract of François Paboeuf and Barbe Colin, and the guardianship “for the minors of Francois Eloy” are all entries of 4 January 1742 in Lawrie Cena Dean’s digest of the Kaskaskia Manuscripts (1981). Two days later his widow appears as “Barbe Colin, of Fort de Chartres, widow of the late Francois Eloy dit St. Francois”.

The link to Francoise Eloi

Francoise’s marriage to Pierre Lambremont, in the register of Ste. Anne at Fort de Chartres, names her as “Marie francoise Eloy fille de francois Eloy et de Marie Barbe Colin legitimes epoux”, already a widow. The head of the leaf is torn away with its date; the entry stands between an act of August 1764 and one of 27 May 1765.

Briggs

Winstanley Briggs’s description of him comes from an essay on the women of the French Illinois Country in The Quiet Heritage (1987), page 67.