♀Jeanne Guedon

Jeanne Guedon (born 1699; died 1762) was a woman of Lay-Saint-Christophe, a village just north of Nancy in the duchy of Lorraine^W, who married a man from Tallard, a market town in the Alps of Dauphiné^W, described in the register as a “bourg de France”. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Anne Roche.

Family and marriage

Jeanne was the daughter of Jean Guedon and Françoise Thiery, parishioners of Lay-Saint-Christophe. Her father had died by November 1719, when her marriage act calls him the late Jean Guedon. She was born on 20 December 1699 and baptized at Lay-Saint-Christophe on 25 December, Christmas Day; her godmother was Jeanne Husson, and the surname of her godfather, Sebastien, is hard to read in the register. Five brothers and sisters were baptized in the same parish: Dominique (1689), Humbert Nicolas (1690), Marguerite Françoise (1702), Catherine (1704) and Joseph Nicolas (1705), and a Marie Guedon who married there in 1705 was probably an elder sister. Jeanne was about nineteen at her wedding.

On 21 November 1719 she married Claude Roche at Lay-Saint-Christophe, after banns read on the three Sundays of 5, 12 and 19 November; the curé was Nicolas Husson. The act names the groom as the son of Gaspard Roche and Magdeleine Faure, of the parish of Saint-Grégoire at Tallard, “bourg de France en Dauphiné”. The phrase mattered in 1719: Lorraine was then an independent duchy, not part of the kingdom of France, so the clerk was recording that the bridegroom came from abroad. Claude had been baptized at Tallard on 23 April 1694 and was twenty-five at the wedding. How he came to settle in Lorraine is not recorded. A Dominique Roche was among those who signed the register; the act does not say how he was related to the couple.

Widowhood

The couple’s daughter Anne married Laurent Sigur at Lay-Saint-Christophe on 16 January 1759, and that act names her as the daughter of the late Claude Roche and of Jeanne Guedon, so Jeanne was a widow by then. According to the indexed baptism register of Lay-Saint-Christophe, the couple had eleven children baptized there between 1722 and 1740, two of whom died as infants; Anne, born on 2 July 1740, was the youngest.

Jeanne appears in the register on 9 December 1759, when she stood godmother at Lay-Saint-Christophe to Jeanne Sigur, the first known child of her daughter and son-in-law, born on 6 December; both of the child’s grandmothers were named Jeanne. The register calls her “Jeanne Guedon, veuve de Claude Roche”. Her daughter and son-in-law later left Lorraine; by 1778 they were living at St. Gabriel, in Spanish Louisiana. Jeanne died at Lay-Saint-Christophe on 3 July 1762, after receiving the last sacraments, and was buried the next day inside the parish church, “in the presence of a very large number of parishioners”. The burial act calls her the widow of the late Claude Roche and gives her age as about sixty-six, though her 1699 baptism makes her sixty-two. Among those who signed were members of the Roche family and her son-in-law Laurent Sigur.

Notes

At the 1759 baptism the clerk’s spelling of her surname looks more like “Gueldon”; the marriage acts of 1719 and 1759 both write “Guedon”. An online family tree gives her dates as 1689 to 1762. Its 1762 death agrees with the burial act of July 1762; its 1689 birth year does not. The register gives her birth as 1699; 1689 is the year her brother Dominique was baptized.