♂Gaspard Roche

Gaspard Roche (died 8 June 1708) was a townsman of Tallard, a market town on the Durance in Dauphiné^W, who signed his name in the parish registers and appears in them for more than thirty years as a father, godfather and witness. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Claude Roche.

Family

His parents are not known. The parish registers of Saint-Grégoire of Tallard survive only from 1674, and his own baptism and his marriage to Magdeleine Faure both fall before that year, so no record of either survives there; the index of Tallard marriages compiled by the genealogical society of the Hautes-Alpes has no marriage of the couple. The earliest act naming the couple is the baptism of their son Dominique on 19 August 1675, where the curé calls the father “sieur Gaspard Roche”. The couple’s daughter Marguerite was of age to marry by 1692, so the marriage was probably made in the late 1660s or early 1670s.

The Tallard registers name eight children of Gaspard and Magdeleine: Marguerite, Estienne, Dominique (baptized 1675), Marie Anne (1678), Madeleine (1685), Jeanne (1688), Catherine (1690) and Claude, baptized on 23 April 1694, when his father was about fifty. Estienne, already of age, stood godfather to his sister Jeanne in January 1688, and the act calls him “Estienne Roche, son of the said Gaspard”. Madeleine was buried in September 1696, aged about twelve. Magdeleine Faure’s brothers were André Faure, a procureur, and Estienne Faure, a surgeon; both witnessed Marguerite’s marriage.

Gaspard also had a sister, Anne Roche, the wife of Jean Reibert, who had died by 1693. When her son Anthoine Reibert married at Tallard on 29 April 1693, Gaspard signed as a witness and the register calls him “uncle of the said groom”; an uncle on the mother’s side who shares her maiden name is her brother.

At Tallard

On 18 February 1692 Gaspard gave his daughter Marguerite in marriage to Joseph Borel, in the presence of her brother Estienne, her mother’s two brothers, and her cousins Anthoine Pauchon, a carpenter, and Anthoine Reibert. He signed that act, as he signed his son Claude’s baptism in 1694. In 1694 he stood godfather twice, to Marguerite’s daughter Marguerite Borel on 23 March and to Gaspard Ricard in September, and on 4 February 1698 he witnessed the marriage of Gaspard Farnaud and Isabeau Borel. On 15 January 1703 he was present as father of the groom when Estienne married Marguerite Ebrard.

Gaspard Roche was buried at Tallard on 8 June 1708. The act gives his age as sixty-five, which places his birth about 1643, and names no kin; he is identified by his name, his parish and his age, as the only adult Gaspard Roche in the Tallard registers of the time. His son Claude had left for the duchy of Lorraine by 1719, when he married at Lay-Saint-Christophe, near Nancy; the marriage act names him as the son of Gaspard Roche and Magdeleine Faure, of the parish of Saint-Grégoire at Tallard.