♂Jean Baptiste Marcotte

Jean Baptiste Marcotte was a native of Canada, named in a Spanish baptismal register kept in Louisiana as the paternal grandfather of Augustin Marcotte. He was probably the fourth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his son Jean Baptiste Marcotte (died by 1808).

Family

On 20 April 1802 Father Juan Brady baptized Augustin in the church of St. Paul the Apostle at Mansura, in Avoyelles, and wrote into the entry the names of the boy’s grandparents. On the father’s side they were Juan Bautista Marcotte and María Chatillon, “naturales del Canadá”, natives of Canada. The register says nothing more about them: not where in Canada they came from, and not whether either was still living. His parents are given as Jacques Marcotte and Louise Baudet, who was probably the woman buried at Cap-Santé in February 1760, aged eighty-four; the Cap-Santé marriage entry described below, of 8 November 1725, calls the groom the son of Jacques Marcot and Louise Beaudet, as the priest wrote their names. No record connects them with the man named in 1802.

Death

A burial at Cap-Santé probably marks his death. On 15 August 1777 the parish priest buried a Jean Baptiste Marcot, the register’s spelling, of that parish, aged seventy-two, who had died the day before and had received the last sacraments. The entry names no wife, so the identification is probable.

Notes

His wife is given as Marie Marguerite Hardy dit Chatillon, Chatillon being the dit name, or by-name, of her Hardy family, and the couple are placed at Cap-Santé, on the St. Lawrence above Québec. That identification rests on compilations: the genealogical dictionary of Cyprien Tanguay^W gives the marriage of Jean Baptiste Marcotte and Marie Marguerite Hardy dit Chatillon at Cap-Santé on 8 November 1725, and a Canadian genealogical index spells her name out in full. The 1802 register uses the by-name alone. A notarial index records the couple’s marriage contract on 5 November 1725, three days before the church marriage; an index of the church register gives 6 November, but the register entry itself is dated 8 November. Tanguay records her burial at Cap-Santé on 27 April 1754 and gives the couple a son Jean Baptiste, born 24 July 1738, whose baptism is in the Cap-Santé register: the priest named the parents as Jean Baptiste Marcotte and Marie Marguerite Hardy, “sa légitime épouse”, his lawful wife. Of the nine children of the couple baptized at Cap-Santé between 1726 and 1740, only one was named Jean Baptiste. Cap-Santé held several Marcotte households that each named a son Jean Baptiste, seven boys of that name being baptized there in 1761 alone, and no known record ties the 1738 child to the man who died in Louisiana. A family history written by a descendant gives Jean Baptiste Marcotte a birth in 1700 and a death in 1777.

The 1777 burial

The burial of 15 August 1777 names no spouse or parent, so it is matched to him by age and place alone: he is the only Jean-Baptiste Marcot of that age at Cap-Santé. Its age of seventy-two would put his birth about 1705, five years later than the birth about 1700 given by Tanguay’s dictionary and by a descendant’s family history, and no baptism for him survives in the registers. The burial of a different Jean Marcot, aged seventy, at Cap-Santé in December 1775 belongs to another man.