♀Jeanne Marie Cardinal

Jeanne Marie Cardinal (16 March 1756 – 24 July 1822) was a French Canadian woman born at Detroit who grew up at Post Vincennes on the Wabash, where she married Joseph Seraphin Tougas dit Laviolette in 1773 and, as his widow, André Montplaisir in 1795. Through her mother she descended from Pierre Maillet and Marie-Anne Hardy of Montreal, and so did the woman her son married, which made the couple fourth cousins. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Augustus A. Tougas dit Laviolette (1776–1849).

Early life

She was born at Detroit on 16 March 1756 and baptized the next day at Ste-Anne, the eldest known child of Jean Baptiste Cardinal and Marie Anne Mallet, who had married there the year before. Detroit was then a French post in the Pays-d’en-Haut, the upper country of New France. A sister, Marie Anne, was baptized at Detroit in 1758. By January 1761 the family had moved to Vincennes, where four more children were baptized between 1761 and 1767, and her father’s brother Nicolas Cardinal also settled there.

Marriage and family

On 16 January 1773 the register of St. Francis Xavier at Vincennes records her marriage to Joseph Seraphin Tougas dit Laviolette, “native of Boucherville in Canada”. It calls her Marie Jeanne Cardinal “of this parish”, which places her at Vincennes by then, and names among the witnesses her father and her uncle Nicolas on her side and the groom’s brother Jean Baptiste Tougas on his. The priest was the missionary Pierre Gibault, who five years later helped bring Vincennes over to the American side when George Rogers Clark took the Illinois Country.

Their son Augustus was born at Vincennes about 1776, one of seven children recorded to the couple there between 1774 and 1792, two of whom died young. A county history published in 1883 names four Tougas brothers of that generation, August, William, Joseph and Francis; those four match four sons the Vincennes register names: Augustus, Guillaume, Joseph and François Xavier. Augustus married Ellenore S. Renaud dit Deslauriers in 1801. Jeanne Marie’s mother, Marie Anne Mallet, was a granddaughter of Rene Malet, a son of Pierre Maillet and Marie-Anne Hardy, who had married at Montreal in 1662; Ellenore descended from another son of the same couple, Pierre Maillet the younger, so that bride and groom each stood five generations below them.

Joseph Seraphin died at Vincennes in December 1793. On 10 April 1795, at St. Francis Xavier, she married André Montplaisir, the son of Nicolas Montplaisir and Magdalene Lacoste; the index of that marriage calls her a widow and the daughter of Jean B. Cardinal and M. A. Mallet. The couple had a daughter, Barbe, born on 12 April 1796 and christened on 5 June 1796 at Vincennes; Barbe married Pierre Dubois there on 26 August 1820. André Montplaisir was buried on 29 December 1803, leaving her a widow a second time. About 1806 she claimed four hundred acres of donation land as head of a family, under the name “widow Montplaisir, alias Tougas, alias Laviolette”.

Notes

An online memorial gives her death as 24 July 1822 and her burial at Rochester, in what is now Wabash County, Illinois, under the name Marie Jeanne Cardinal Montplaisir. Both are identical to those of her daughter-in-law Ellenore, whose gravestone at Rochester reads July 1822, and no record of her own has been found to support them; the date may have been carried over from Ellenore’s. The St. Francis Xavier burials at Vincennes, which run to 1838 in a survey printed in 1975, hold no burial for her under any of her names (Cardinal, Montplaisir, Tougas or Laviolette), and neither do the register indexes for 1794 to 1840.

The same memorial gives her birth as 17 March 1756 at Kaskaskia, and a local history of the Rochester cemetery says she met her husband at Kaskaskia about 1770. The Detroit register settles the birth: born 16 March, baptized 17 March, at Detroit. Many online family trees give her as a daughter of Yves Cardinal and Renée Mercier of Cléder, in Brittany; her own marriage entry at Vincennes names her parents as Jean Baptiste Cardinal and Marie Anne Mallet. The index of her second marriage names her first husband as “Jean B. Touga”; the 1773 entry names him Joseph. It is a slip: the Jean Baptiste Touga of Vincennes, husband of Catherine Campaux, had been buried in 1790.