♂Francois Emery dit Codere

Francois Emery dit Codere (c. 1700 – before 1756), known in Indiana as François Godere, was a voyageur and fur trader of New France who settled on the Wabash River at the Ouiatenon post and whose children founded the Godere family of Vincennes. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son François Godere (1740–1780).

Origins

He was born about 1700, probably at Contrecoeur on the St Lawrence, the son of Antoine Emery dit Coderre, a soldier of the Carignan-Salières regiment born in 1643, and his second wife Marie Anne Favreau dit Deslauriers. The Contrecoeur parish registers for 1698 to 1700 are lost, and no baptism survives. Two hiring contracts identify him: on 29 April 1720 Jean Quesnel engaged “François Émery” for a voyage to the upper country and back the following year, and on 6 August 1721 Alphonse de Tonty, commandant of Detroit, engaged “François Émery dit Coderre of Contrecoeur” for a voyage from Montreal to Detroit with no return specified. He did not come back: in July 1737 two Montreal court acts settling his family’s affairs describe him as absent, “de present aux Illinois” (then in the Illinois country).

Ouiatenon and Vincennes

By about 1735 he was at Ouiatenon, the French post among the Wea on the Wabash, where he married Agnes Richard Dit Lafleur (1719–1778), daughter of the post’s blacksmith and interpreter Jean Baptiste Richard dit Lafleur and Marie-Anne You de la Couverte. Eight children were born to them between about 1736 and 1752, the five eldest sons at Ouiatenon. In the king’s expense statement for the upper country for 1749, “the Sieur Gauderre” and one Constant were paid for two cows, at 120 livres each, supplied to the king’s service at Ouiatenon, the accounts’ spelling of his name.

The family appears in the Vincennes register in 1750, when a daughter, Agnes, about a year old, drowned in the Wabash fifteen leagues from the post; the entry records the parents as still living at Ouiatenon. That burial is his last appearance in any record. His widow married Jean-Baptiste Vaudry at Vincennes on 28 August 1756, so he had died by then; the family record gives 1755.

The family at Vincennes

At Vincennes the name was written Coderre, Codere, Goder and Godere, and Godere became the settled form. His sons René, Pierre, François, Louis and Toussaint all married at Vincennes and raised families there; a county history of 1988 records the five brothers as soldiers and voyageurs, and that the wife of one of them made the flag for George Rogers Clark.

Notes

Several hundred online family trees give him a birth in 1709 or 1710 at Boucherville or Quebec and a death at “Fort Marshall, South Dakota” in 1754; those belong to another man or to no one, and are not followed here.