♂Guillaume Tougas dit Laviolette Sr.

Guillaume Tougas dit Laviolette (19 August 1674 – buried 23 September 1708) was a Norman-born soldier from Fatouville, in the diocese of Lisieux, who served in the company of Monsieur de Louvigny at Montréal and settled there. At twenty-three he married Marie Brazeau, a Parisian widow twelve years his senior, and he died ten years later, leaving her with six children. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Guillaume Tougas dit Laviolette (1699–1756).

Origins

The family record gives his birth as 19 August 1674 at Fatouville, in Normandy (today in the department of Eure). His parents were Guillaume Tougas and Marie Labbe; his Montréal marriage register names them as “Guillaume Tougard et Marie Labbe, de la paroisse de Fatouville de l’évesché de Lisieux”, and Cyprien Tanguay’s genealogical dictionary and a published compilation of Norman settlers in Canada give the same parents and the same parish. His marriage register and Tanguay spell the surname Tougard. When and how he crossed to Canada is not recorded in the sources used here.

Marriage and family

On 10 November 1698, at Notre-Dame de Montréal, “Guillaume Tougard dit Laviolette”, a soldier of Monsieur de Louvigny’s company, married Marie Brazeau (1663–1735). The register gives her age as thirty-five; the published index of Québec parish acts gives his as twenty-three. She was the widow of Sylvain Guerin and the daughter of Nicolas Brazeau and Perrine Billard, of the parish of Saint-Paul in Paris. All three banns were dispensed. The witnesses were a fellow soldier of the company, Antoine Pinel, and two of the bride’s brothers, one of them Charles Brazeau. Marie Brazeau signed the register; the groom did not. A notarial marriage contract between the couple is dated the day before, 9 November 1698, the usual order in the colony, where the contract preceded the church wedding.

The couple had six children, born between 1699 and 1708, the number the compilation of Norman settlers gives. The eldest, Guillaume, was baptized at Notre-Dame on 29 September 1699. Two of the younger children married in the 1730s: Pelagie, born in January 1708, married Pierre Leduc in 1730, and Charles, born in 1706, married at La Prairie in 1733, where the register calls him the son of “the late Guillaume Tougas” and Marie Brazeau.

Death

He was buried at Montréal on 23 September 1708, aged about thirty-four; the register gives the burial, not the date of death, and the cause is not recorded. His youngest child, Pelagie, was eight months old. Marie Brazeau lived on at Montréal until 1735.

Notes

The birth year is not settled. The family record has 19 August 1674; the index of the marriage act makes him twenty-three in November 1698, and both Tanguay and the compilation of Norman settlers give 1675. The difference of a year has not been resolved.

Several online family trees placed his birth at Faverolles-la-Campagne, also in Normandy. The marriage register names Fatouville, as Tanguay does.

The family in Normandy is still being traced. The Fatouville parish register survives from 1664, but no burial of his father has yet been found in it, and his father’s dates in the family record rest on compiled trees. One index of Québec church records gives him the surname Pugard and different parents, François Pugard and Jeanne Lacampagne; the marriage register itself names Guillaume Tougard and Marie Labbe, and the index is not followed here.