♂Guillaume Tougas

Guillaume Tougas (1648 – January 1677) was a native of Fatouville, in Normandy, in the diocese of Lisieux, known chiefly from his son’s marriage in Canada: in 1698 the register of Notre-Dame de Montréal named the groom’s parents as “Guillaume Tougard et Marie Labbe, de la paroisse de Fatouville de l’évesché de Lisieux”. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Guillaume Tougas dit Laviolette (1674–1708).

Life

The family record places his birth in 1648 at Fatouville, in Normandy (today Fatouville-Grestain, in the department of Eure), and names his parents as Charles Tougas and Francoise Deshaies. The Fatouville register of 15 October 1673, at the marriage of his brother Raulin, calls Raulin the son of Charles and of Françoise Deshayes, which supports that parentage, though the act does not name Guillaume himself. A genealogical file of French emigrants to Canada lists Charles Tougard and Françoise Deshaies as married about 1630, with children Raulin, Guillaume, Thomas, Jean and Marie. His baptism is not confirmed by a record: the surviving Fatouville parish register begins in 1664.

He married Marie Labbe (1645–1735) on 7 November 1667. The family record puts the wedding at Saintes, in Saintonge, but that place comes from online family trees; another compiled tree gives Fatouville, where every other fact about the family points, and the marriage act itself is not yet known. The couple’s son Guillaume was baptized at Fatouville in August 1674, the register naming Guillaume Tougard and Marie Labbé as his parents; the family record gives the day as the 19th, which the register’s handwriting leaves uncertain. He later went to Canada as a soldier in the company of Monsieur de Louvigny, married at Montréal and died there in 1708.

Death

The family record gives his death as January 1677 at Fatouville, with burial there the same year. Those dates rest on compiled trees. The Fatouville register has no burial of a Tougard between October 1676 and the end of 1677. The register has no entries at all for 1 to 22 January 1677, between the close of the 1676 volume and the first act of 1677, so a death in the first weeks of that month would not appear in it.

Notes

The family record once carried his son’s 1698 Montréal marriage as a second marriage of his own, twenty-one years after his recorded death; the wedding belongs to the son, as the Montréal register and Cyprien Tanguay’s genealogical dictionary show. No parish record confirms his birth year, his marriage place, or the date and place of his death.